Wilcox, William (Bill)

BILL WILCOX
WAR WORK
Well I graduated from Washington Lee College in 1943, Washington Lee University 1943 in May and got a job with the Manhattan Project up in Detroit at an American Chemical Society meeting. I’d had a degree in college in chemistry, and the head of the department sent me to the ACS meeting and said, “You guys go and just register. Then you’ll have interviews with people.” I knew that I wanted something to do with some vital war work, and so I put that on my resume at the top of the sheet. Of course it was in the middle of World War II. This was May of 1943, and many of our classmates had gone into the service and, we all wanted to do something to help win the war. I ended up with 18 different interviews at the ACS meeting. I was amazed. I had never been; I didn’t have a great deal of self confidence at the time and I just thought, my gracious sakes! The first interview I had was with a very impressive older looking gentleman from Heinz Company in Pittsburgh and it turns out he wanted me to do vitamin C, ascorbic acid analyses of tomatoes in the tomato soup and juice production lines. I said, “That sounds like that will be interesting work, but I really want something to do with the war.” But when I look back on it after the war and found out what the Manhattan Project was like, I could identify 12 of the 18 interviews that would have gotten me somewhere into the war because of Kelex. I had a Kelex interview and an interview with Ames Iowa who was doing the uranium processing and so on and so on.
But the one that interested me most was the Eastman Kodak interview and there again it was kind of, I said, “Will this be vital war work?” And they said, “Yes indeed. Son, I’ve looked at your resume, and I think that we might be very interested in you. We’re hiring a number of technical people.” And I said, “I like Eastman Kodak’s reputation. What kind of work will it be?” He said, “It would be war work.” I said, “No, I said, I’m a chemist, what kind of chemistry will it involve?” “Well I can’t tell you. It’s secret.” I said, “Well, will it be in Rochester, NY?” “No, no, it won’t be.” “Well where in the country will it be?” “Well I can’t tell you. It’s secret.” And on and on, this interview went on for ten minutes and all he would tell me is nothing, how long will it last and will I have a job after the war and son on. So I didn’t really see anything to object to. So I told him yes, I’d really welcome an offer. I was hired and got a telegram to come to Rochester, NY on May the 26th and that was my official hire date, May the 26th.
He told us when we got there, the gentleman that interviewed me and my lab partner, Paul Blakely, also from Washington Lee, very formidable gentleman, three piece suit, black vest, tie, balding, Doctor J.G. McNally who ended up as the number two man at Y12. He was Doctor Conklin’s operations manager. He was the technical brains behind the chemistry and the business here at Y12 which was a huge part. But Doctor McNally introduced us to the project and welcomed us to Eastman Kodak and he said, “Gentlemen,” he said, “as chemists you need to know that you’ll be working on uranium, but that is the last time you will hear that word or use that word until the war is over.” Paul and I were both sitting there sort of holding our knuckles down. He said you will be calling it tuballoy and all of the compounds of uranium that you work with you will call by it’s proper name, combining name with tuballoy, like tubineal oxide, tubineal chloride, tubineal tetrachloride and so on and so on. Said if you use that name in writing or in talking during the war you will be subject to immediate discharge and possible persecution and so on and so on. That was our introduction.
Well we did not know of course that Oak Ridge at that time, May of ’43, was still being cleared of farms and roads were being built and fences and they were hard at work starting to build the town. But up there in Rochester we worked in Kodak Park laboratories, there were about 50 of us that had come from colleges all over the country. Chemical engineers and chemists, physicists, they were looking for the people that would end up being the front line supervisors and their staffs, Eastman Kodak’s, research people ended up as our bosses here at Y12. We referred to it all that summer as we worked in locked laboratories on uranium processing methods. We worked with each other in small groups, and we learned the meaning of the words need to know, and Jack Borcey and Roger Gibbs and I knew what we had to do in our laboratory but down the hall where Paul Blakely worked and worked on analytical methods, we didn’t talk, even outside, we were told that we were not to be curious about what others were doing, and they wouldn’t talk.
So that was the start to our introduction to security. We had a fascinating time that summer, of course we were all out of college, and we were all getting paychecks for the first time.
DOGPATCH, USA
The work that we were doing that summer in the labs on tuballoy, of course to us the uranium chemistry was all brand new and yet it became very apparent to us very quickly that there was a complete absence of information in the recorded literature about uranium. We asked for a textbook. There aren’t any.
Do we have any consultants in uranium chemistry? No, there aren’t any. We’re developing our own uranium chemistry, we had one book that was a paperbound book on the rare elements, and they were all in there and uranium was just one of them that was mentioned, three or four pages of uranium chemistry, but that’s what we were doing that summer was developing an understanding of uranium, how you detect it in solutions or how you purify it in particularly and it became very apparent that we were interested in an extremely valuable material. So it wasn’t before the end of the summer that we had pretty much understood that we were working on with uranium isotopes and with precious uranium 235 and speculated that it was for purposes of some kind of military weapon, but we didn’t know any details, and we weren’t furnished with any information about that.
We knew we were not going to stay there. We knew we were going to some other place and all through the summer we referred to it as dogpatch form the Lil Abner cartoon. We just assumed it was going to be back in the sticks somewhere because we’d ask questions of our bosses. You know is it going to be on the west coast? Don’t think so. Will it be on the east coast? Don’t think so. But we had no idea where it was going to be and it was just fortuitous that we started picking that name and referring to it as dogpatch, eventually we were going to go there. And about August or so they started talking about us going next week, or a couple of weeks from now or something like that and that schedule kept getting slipped and slipped and slipped.
We finally all came down here in October, the end of October. The notice we got I think was less than a week or so, and as you could imagine we greeted it with something less than enthusiasm. A lot of the girls that we’d been dating that summer had already gone back to college so that made it a little easier on us, but we really enjoyed our life up there in Rochester, it’s a nice city, lots of advantages. We lived downtown at the YMCA. But we came down here. Most of the guys got railroad tickets for Knoxville, Tennessee and that was our first clue. Oh, we’re going to Knoxville, Tennessee, and we flew to the library to read about Knoxville. One of the boys up there, I bet you the only one out of 50, was a Rochester native and was the fortunate owner of an automobile, and he was going to drive down here. Earl was his name, and I flipped a coin right and I ended up with a seat in his car. There were five of us and we drove down, took a couple of days. But I remember that first night in Knoxville, we got to Knoxville, I thought it looked like—it was raining, it was dark, it was dismal, it was chilly. We ended up in a fleabag hotel back down some narrow back street, I don’t know how we ever got there. It’s long since been torn down fortunately, and then the next day we drove up and came up Old Solway road to the Solway entrance and that was our introduction to Oak Ridge.
It was a shock to get here. Everything was brand new, everything was wood, everything was bustling, there was construction going on everywhere. They were putting up this building, that building, and so on. The roads just had a thin coat of gravel on them, but they were dirt roads and we came in and ended up at the T.E.C. employment building in Oak Ridge which is the Tennel building now, down on the turnpike and they told us to go up the street and get a dormitory room and report to Y-12 the next morning.
Well where’s Y-12? Well you go up to the bus station and you get on a bus that says Y-12. Do you understand that? Yes, we understand that. Okay. The bus station of course when we got there had these strange code names that made absolutely no sense to us, but they were all administration areas, X10, K25, Y12, and it was easy to get around, you just went with the flow.
But the dorm room, we got a dorm room, and we were very pleased with our dorm room.
It was, as I said it was just brand new and it had this gorgeous new furniture in it, gorgeous because we’d been living in the downtown YMCA in Rochester and the furniture was 1910 I guess, with cigarette burns everywhere, and you know the beds had sagging mattresses and everything else. These were brand new, you know, nice, beautiful, we thought, beautiful bed spreads and so on.
Everything was wooden, door knobs, the lamp stands and everything, the knobs on all the dressers and so on, everything was wood, but it was all clean and nice, and we couldn’t complain about the rent, it was $10 a month. We thought that was reasonable. But then in a couple of days we found out that we had to get a third person in our double room which was, the room was about this big you know and just room enough for two beds but they came in and took out the one bed and put in a double bunk bed, and I slept up on top of that for the first few months. They were jammed for rooms. Our dormitory number was M3, and I remember Paul and I standing out there on the porch saying, “Do these things mean anything or are they just artificial numbers?” He said, “Just look across the street there.” There were four dormitories right across the street and nothing in them but girls, and it was W 56, W7. He says, “I’ll bet you a dollar that that M stands for men.” My gosh, that’s a great observation, let’s go walk around town, and so by the time we ended up in the cafeteria at night we had wondered around the townside and we counted up to 10 women’s dormitories and only five men’s dormitories. We figured that that was a pretty good ratio. So our first introduction to the town, of course as young single guys, I’m sure it was different from our bosses that came down and lived in special houses albums, but for us that was, you know it was very nice.
Y12 when we got here, we got to 9203. Paul and I were both chemists, and it was the first chemistry building finished. I say first without claiming too much, 9202 next door was finished just about the same time.9202 was intended to be the bulk treatment facility is what we called it and it did all the chemistry that was necessary to get the feed material for the alpha calutrons, and 9203 right next door was the chemistry building that was supposed to take the pockets that came out of alpha, the product pockets and wash them, get the uranium out of it and then have other people in that same building, 9203, purify it, and get it converted back from some solution that they used to wash it out with, turn it back into uranium tetrachloride as feed for the beta units.
So 9203 was initially planned as the beta chemistry building and 9202 as the alpha chemistry building. And this Rochester contingent was divided between those two buildings. 9203 in addition to recovering the product from the alpha units, and processing it to uranium tetrachloride was also the home of the analytical chemistry for the whole group under Charlie Thornton
REFINING Y-12
The front end of the building next to the analytical laboratories was all set apart for the isotopic analysis for Y12 and then there were offices across the front end before you got to the change house.
It’s sort of incredible to us today that anybody thought we could do all the alpha chemistry in 9202 and all the beta chemistry as well as the analytical labs and the isotopic analysis in one little relatively small building. The explanation for that is that at the time 9202 and 03 were built, Y12 was thought to involve maybe three alpha buildings and two beta buildings and all through that period, 1943 out at Los Alamos what was going on was that the theoretical physicists were sitting around scratching their heads about just what the critical mass was going to be. So how much of this 235 did they need? And every time they did a new set of calculations and thought about new problems, the critical mass would get a little bit larger. So then Oppenheimer would tell Groves that Y-12 needs to be a little bit bigger.
XAX and XBX down in 9731, during this period, October/November, they started up in October/November of 1943, they started running alpha units, and we soon in 9202 got some of the alpha pockets out of the 9731 XAX and started doing experiments with, instead of what we call cold uranium up in Rochester, absolutely nothing was enriched of course, but instead of working with cold uranium to work out our chemistry processes for purifying this stuff, we could actually start working on something that was enriched. It was enriched very small amounts but nevertheless we kept very, very careful, took very, very extraordinary precautions to make sure. For example we used a glass beaker or Florence flasks or something. We always had a stainless steel can to put them in. We had stainless steel cans made for all of our glass equipment so that if we had an accident we wouldn’t lose anything. We were still working with very, very low enrichments up through February of 1944. But these were very small buildings and when we got the first material ready, Los Alamos, I never knew this of course down in my lab, but what was going on was that Oppenheimer’s people were dying to get their hands on some enriched uranium in quantities so they could start doing experiments to really determine just exactly what this critical mass was. And of course Groves was very anxious too. So he’s beating on us to get the production out, and Oppenheimer’s people are just waiting for it anxiously, and the first calutron really alpha calutron got started up in November, late in November of ’43 and it turned out to be a disaster, as the history books tell us. The magnet shorted out and it was just, it was just a total flop. They hadn’t had a chance to really work out all of the problems in XAX, and so it’s no surprise when the production units got together first time any of these things had been tried that they had trouble. But it was; they had to send the magnets back to Milwaukee to Alice Chandlers and change the gap spacing and change the way the oil was purified so that it didn’t have foreign materials in it that caused these electrical shorts. General Groves just went berserk over this thing but the “pipeline”, the “pipeline” of equipment that was being build by Alice Chandlers and so on, they were trying to build calutrons as fast as they could, so that as soon as they detected that there was this problem with magnet gaps and contaminated oil, they immediately took steps to fix the problem so that we didn’t just take the old stuff out and send it back and have it fixed and sent back. We ripped that stuff out and put these new units in. So that in January by the end of January the first of the brand new units with proper spacing and cleanliness started operating and turning out small amounts of low enriched uranium, ten to fifteen percent from alpha, and that stuff started coming over to 9202 and we started cleaning those and purifying the material. That’s where my gang all worked. I was in the labs in the back end of the building that took the solution from the cleaning of the pockets across the hall, and we took it. It was then contaminated with copper and iron and nickel and so on from stainless steel parts that they washed, and we had to purify it with ether extraction and turn it into U03, and then it went next door up the hall in 9202 and the guys took the U03, reduced it to U02 and chlorinated it to UCL5 with carbon tetrachloride, and then they sublimed it to UCL4 and loaded into pockets for the beta calutrons.
CLOSE CALL
The production lines started cranking up there in January and February. Los Alamos was dying for stuff. The first real batch that we put together was about 200 grams of uranium oxide ready to go to Los Alamos as the oxide, and I actually had my hands on that. I was in charge of purifying one step of that, not the whole thing, but it had to come through my laboratory back there in 9202, and it was responsible for me getting closer to getting fired than I ever got in my life. We had no idea where it was going, Los Alamos. The word was from my boss and from his boss who came and talked to us, followed the 200 grams all through the cycle, how are we doing? Will it be done by 3:00 this afternoon? Is there anyway we can get it done by 2:00 and so on and so on. Are you sure you’re not going to lose any? Yup, yup, yup. I had no idea what the enrichment was, had no idea it was going to Los Alamos, this was all stuff that I’ve been able to overlay afterwards, but I knew it was very important, and I had to get it very, very pure and make sure I didn’t lose anything. My job that one afternoon was to filter it out on a Buchner funnel and suck it through there and collect it on this filter paper and then cal sign it from UO4 which we precipitated it as, turn it into U03. All I had to do was; I got it out, and I got it all filtered. Oh it was a beautiful, looks like lemon, U04 as it’s precipitated, uranium from a solution with hydrogen peroxide and it looks just like a lemon cheesecake. It’s a gorgeous color. Lemon pudding is what it looks like, very, very pretty. And then when you cal sign it, it burns, turns into U03 and that’s a nice finely grained yellow powder, a very, very pretty orangey powder, and so I had it down, nice lemon custard in the Buchner funnel, fill the paper here, that thing here, had it sitting in a cup, a nickel cup, and there’s a bead around the glass Buchner funnel, just a little bead around the lip to increase it’s strength or something. It caught on the rims of this nickel cup and I thought, well that’s fine, that means it won’t, at the bottom the thing will not be talking about the bottom, and we’d get some kind of too hot.
Well I put it in the oven, and I went home and turned on the timer, and when I came in the next morning I was ready to get the 200 grams out and take it to the next step of the processing. We’re going to package it up somehow in containers to send out to Los Alamos. I didn’t know where, but we were going to package it up and send it to somebody. So I went in with a light heart and took my galoshes off, or shoes, or whatever it is, rubbers. We always had to take our shoes off in the change house and change into some kind of work clothes because the building was spotlessly clean. And one of my friends came over and said, “Hey Bill, anything happen last night?” I said, “Yes, we did our job I think.” He said, “Well the word is out that Doctor Ballard is looking for you, and I suspect from the way he was talking that it isn’t going to be to give you any raise.” He said, “As a matter of fact I’d suggest that you just sort of go to your laboratory by a side route if you can.” Well, I just can’t imagine. So I went back to the lab, stood a little bit, and I said, “I can’t stand this.” So I went up to talk to my boss, direct boss. Ballard’s one up the line. And I said, “Harlow, anything wrong?” He said, “Sure is!” I said, “What in the world, what happened?” He said, “Did you calsign that oxide last night?” I said, “Yeah I did.” “Did you put it in a nickel container like you’re supposed to?” Sorry I misspoke it was stainless steel. “Yes sir, sure did.” He said, “You know what happened?” He said, “That stainless steel container grew as you put it in the furnace, and it got hot and expanded and that Buchner funnel that fit just on top with a little bead just holding it, that just dropped right down in and when the furnace went off and it cooled off that stainless steel came down and crushed that and now that precious material is all mixed up with that sand in the filter. It’s a fritted filter glass, and we’ve got to reprocess that. It’s going to cost us a full day at least. “Oh, I’ll be glad to do that.” “You keep your hands off of that!” He says, “You’re not to even go in that room.” And he says, “If Ballard gets a hold of you you’re going to get canned.” I said, “Oh my gosh.” I said, “I’m so sorry, I can see what happened now.” He says, “We see what happened too!” I didn’t see Ballard for another day or two, but I finally did see him and he said, “I wasn’t really mad at you.” A couple of months later I lost $50 to him in a poker game, and we got back on reasonably good ground. But that was touch and go. That’s as close as I ever came, that I know of. That just gives you a little feel for how intense it was, how hard we worked. Actually that wasn’t any horrible big deal, but there was, you know, it cost us time. But that eventually the 200 grams did get out to Los Alamos, and they did some physics experiments and helped refine their estimate.
MORE BUILDINGS
In the spring of ’44 when this is going on, in the spring the new estimates made it obvious that 9202, 9203 just couldn’t do the job, and we’re adding other alpha buildings. We’re adding other beta buildings and these are just completely inadequate. So the answer to the expansion of 9202 was 9211, 9207 across the street. The whole bulk treatment operations getting oxide in from Mallencrot in Saint Louis and converting it to, going through the steps U02 to UCL5 and UCL4 uranium purification for alpha and the answer to 9203 for the beta chemistry was 9206 and so Stolen Webster was put to work on crash basis and 9206 was finished by that summer 1944, and we all moved down there. Turned the building 9202 over to the analytical people, and it wasn’t anywhere near big enough for that. So the analytical people ended up in 9733-4 and -3. The analytical, by the next year that wasn’t big enough and they moved up, you know 9212, 9998, and so that’s kind of the sequence of those buildings. Actually before the 9207, 9211 really got into action, the war was over, and so they were turned over to ORNL biology division.
But those early days were just—we worked our tail off. We worked very, very hard and long, long hours. We changed things very, very quickly if we came up with a better process. The process that we worked at in Rochester which involved precipitation processes and electrolytic cells with mercury that we started with down in 9202, somebody came along, I think it was from Brown University, with an ether extraction process, and we changed that work that we’d done, spent five months on up in Rochester. We got the word we’re going to change it to ether extraction, and we were doing ether extraction in a couple of weeks. I mean people came in there night and day and ripped stuff out and put in new stuff and that’s the way it was all over Y-12. We didn’t waste time doing any kind of sitting around naval contemplating and no paper studies and so on. If a new method came along and it really looked like it was going to get something done faster, get it done!
My boss, I’ll never forget the date at the end of the war. When he left, he gathered all of his flock together, guys that he’d mentored and had done the front line supervising through the war, and he gave us a Dutch Uncle talk that I’ll never forget. He said. “Now, I want you to know that the way you’ve been doing things around here is not the way that they do things in industry, and you got the biggest shock coming in your life when you go to work for anybody outside. In the first place, you’ve been used to bringing up a piece of scrap paper with a list of things on it that you want ordered, and you give it to Sally out here and the stuff shows up at the dock.” He said, “In industry they have something called a purchase requisition.” He said, “You’ve never heard of that before.” And he explained purchase requisitions, and then he gave us a lecture on budgeting. He gave us a lecture on accounting, and we’d never heard anything like that. The stock room, the down in the east end of the plant, the warehouses, you just got in your pickup truck and you went down there and the stuff was in bins. Florence flasks, condensers, glass condensers, this and that, everything else, hot plates, stirring motors, stands for equipment, and you just put it in your cart, your buggy, or whatever you had, your basket, and you went back to the lab. The Manhattan Project had a blank check which was one of the reasons they succeeded. It had top priority. They could get stuff when you couldn’t, everybody else couldn’t get it, triple A priority. But of course we did accommodate after the war, and we did learn the rules but it was very, very different at Y-12.
One of the things I remember was that I got a call from the boss, Brigham’s secretary and she said, “You’re supposed to go to a building, 9704-2 at 10:00 tomorrow morning.” Room such and such. I forget. And talk to Mr. So and so. Can’t remember his name. And I said, “What about?” I said, “I’ve never been there before.” You always had to ask because you had passes in your wallet and on your badge as to where you could go and who you could talk to. The badge, if it said, A, B, C, or D you knew what you could talk to somebody about with verifying their clearance or without going to check with their supervisor. But I had passes, I could get in XAX and XBX the first year I was there. I never went, too busy to go. But I had a pass to get in XAX, XBX, and that’s of course is because that’s where the pockets were coming from. But I couldn’t get into any of the alpha buildings or beta buildings and so on and so on. Anyway, I went up there the next day, and he was—he welcomed me, he said, “We’re concerned about the attitudes of people towards the country. We want, this is an extremely important project and we want to be certain that everybody is just as interested in its success as you are.” I said, “Well pleasure around.” I said, “What can I do to help?” He said, “Keep your eyes open. If you hear somebody running down the government or questioning authority or asking too many questions that you know that they shouldn’t be asking, how about letting us know?” I said, “Well, sure, be glad to.” He said, “Well here’s a stack of envelopes and a stack of cards. I appreciate you sending me one every week if you have anything to report just write no report on the card, stick it in there and send it to me.” Address in Knoxville, Acme Credit Company, all rubber stamped, and he gave me a bunch of these. I appreciate very, very much. How you feel about what’s going on? I said, “Well it’s busy. The guys I’m working with are really working hard, and I haven’t heard any problems except that one that I heard about last week.” He said, “Well what was that?” I said, “I’m sure you must know about it. It was that guy that was spouting off from Canada about our country, and all of us were kind of surprised at how vocal he was but we were all surprised too that he wasn’t there the next day.” He said, “Well just keep your eyes open.” I said, “Fine.” I did it all through the war, never talked to anybody that did it. I didn’t know why I was picked.
But at the second meeting of the 43 club in 1957 or 8 or something Ken Dunbar was the president then, and we had some kind of a meeting down at the cafeteria in town, and somebody got up and made this point, he said he just wondered if anybody else had ever been involved in the Acme Credit Company thing.
And Dunbar said, “Well okay, let’s see, let’s see. Is anybody else involved in that?” I’d say 25%, 30% of the people in the room held up their hands. Wartime rules are very, very different and in that war everybody felt very, very much like they were a part of it. They shared the sacrifices, they shared the shortages of food, tires, gasoline rationing, cigarettes, everything. Price controls which common culture today just wouldn’t even think of, but in a war time situation that culture was entirely different, and we were all trying hard to be patriots.
CONSEQUENCE OF HORSEPLAY
The guys that went to Rochester, that first college group, of course got to be good friends that summer in Rochester. It was a nice bunch. It was eclectic. There were people from all over the country, different colleges and universities and different, but we were all interested in the same thing you know.
And we were kids too. It’s amazing that we did what we did. I was 20 and most of them were 21 or 22.
But we had wash bottles, chemists, we had taken an earl meyer flask stopper and a hook neck with a rubber bulb, so that you could wash out beakers, make sure that you got all of the solution out, you’d wash it out with distilled water. Now these wash bottles make very good squirters and when somebody wasn’t looking you could squirt them, and we had girls in the labs too, but that came under the heading of horse play, and we thought it was of course perfectly innocent. What in the hell? We’re chemists, we’re not going to put ammonia in the bottle or hurt anybody. But a decree went out, no horse play. It might cause accidents, as part of the safety thing. And that’s true. I got that thing up there one afternoon, and the next day here comes one of my Rochester buddies down the hall chasing a girl, chasing a laboratory technician who happened to be female (squirt, squirt) back of her neck, both of them laughing like the world, and here’s Ballard coming out of the—. She just sort of comes close to him, couple feet away you know. Well it was so obvious, and so they couldn’t help but do anything and my buddy, he got axed. He didn’t get fired. He got moved to another part of the plant, but we all felt that was carrying things a little too far. You know it’s sort of, we were all very sorry for him because he was a hell of a good guy and brilliant chemical engineer, and was really vitally needed, but you know. So we did have discipline like that and as well as watching for people that were disloyal or that we thought were.
CHRISTMAS CHUG
The first Christmas that the Rochester gang was here Oak Ridge town shape was pretty well fixed.
They had a lot of dormitories to add on and so on, but the semestoes were mostly finished construction, the townsite and so on and so on. And yet we were, as I said, in the middle of the war, and none of us, my own Pennsylvania and some of these guys in Rochester, some of them in Indiana, none of us could go home for Christmas so it was a blue time. And the thing that made it blue, blue was that the gals that we had been dating all fall, our good friends, turned out most of them were Tennesseans and they all evaporated for Christmas. So they weren’t even here. The one mistake that the army engineers made in picking out the site in the mind of us young folks was that both of the counties that they located the reservation in were bone dry as far as liquor laws go, and you just couldn’t get a drink anywhere. Not that we were alcoholics, but we wanted to celebrate occasionally, and all you could drink was 3.2% beer, called Barbarossa Beer at the rec. halls. And you could drink that all night long, all it did was give you a lot of exercise. The Rochester crew though had gotten word before we came to dogpatch that it was bone dry so a couple of us had squirreled some booze. I had a little bottle of Imperial whiskey, but it was a pint. That was nothing.
That didn’t even last through the month of October. But Bob McPherson, one of my best friends in Rochester had squirreled away a bottle of Champagne. We didn’t know anything about it. But we’re all sitting around after eating at the army cafeteria Christmas Eve and feeling sorry for ourselves and he said, “You know boys, I got a bottle of champagne.” He says, “I think what we ought to do is just sort of have ourselves a Christmas toast.” So we went back to M3 dormitory, went up front and there was a water cooler and a tube of those conical shaped white cups. We each got one of those and he popped the cork with ceremony and we all stood around there. There were about five of us I guess, and he poured somebody a drink. I don’t know who it was, but he ford it to him and then he started pouring the other one, and by the time he got this one half poured, this one was on the floor. It turned out that the champagne was a marvelous solvent for whatever little glue there was that held that cup as a cone, and so we said, “Well, we’re going to make the best of a bad situation.” We all got fresh cups and he poured it as fast as he could and we just chug-a-lugged it. The last time I’ve ever, first time and last that I’ve ever chug-a-lugged champagne, but we just drank it down like that and all said, “Merry Christmas” and that was that.
And the next day, I don’t remember if we had Christmas day off or not, but that’s how we celebrated our first Christmas.
RECREATION IN OAK RIDGE
Our work was, you know, most of us worked at least ten hours everyday and worked hard at what we were doing, tried to do it better than we did the day before, faster. And in our case the chemists doing these re-purifications to get it as pure as we could each time, each stage so we didn’t have to re-purify it twice. We worked hard and accomplished a great deal during those days, but after work when we went home we had—the benevolent dictatorship we had here, the, army had recognized that they had loads of perpetual people here, people here that had lived in university towns all over the country or big cities like Rochester and wanted the finer things in life, realizing that this is an army base. Well it really didn’t look anything like an army base except that it was new and we had all these security restrictions. They set up something called a recreation department which really did a spectacular job when I look back on it.
They just fostered all kinds of sporting activities and if you had any inclination to want to start a club, a African violet society or a knitting society, a quilting society, a debating society, as well as bowling leagues and so on, tennis leagues, archery leagues, civil air patrol, they were all there going in the fall when we got there. And they just kept building up, chorus, community chorus, playhouse and so on. So there was lots of activity in the evenings. Lots of guys, lots of gals, 13,000 singles here, and they had what they called recreation halls, big one at Townsite, big one at Grove center, big one at Jefferson a big one in Midtown, and they had dances there, disc jockeys playing big band music on records, and we congregated there and in each of the rec. halls they had bridge rooms and so on. There were lots of things to do. Singles all went to the movies at the center theater in Townsite, the movies changed four times a week which means that we saw four movies a week, and we went to Grove and saw movies and Jefferson and so on and so there was just lots to do outside of work hours. None of it involved talking about what you were doing. You’d never ask somebody. You might ask them what plants they worked at, but beyond that you never asked what they did. The question everybody asked was, “Where are you from?” And that got us off on other geographic discussions. Well don’t you know Will Jones? He went to college and so on. But nevertheless we had, there weren’t any fences on the top of Black Oak Ridge which was neat, and on Sundays we would hike over Black Oak Ridge down on G Road to G Road go over Marlow and hike all through the countryside. Of course the Docit tunnel was one of our key springs, one of our nice Sunday afternoon objectives. I only walked through the Docit tunnel once and that was real fast, but of course we all had to do that at least once.
TROUBLE BREWING
But one afternoon Roger Hibbs and I, a good friend from Rochester were sitting around saying, “You know, we’re chemists and we ought to be able to brew some decent beer instead of this 3.2%. We don’t know how to do it, but we know how to read the literature. Let’s do it.” So we read up on the literature and we weren’t the only people in town making home brew and went over to Clinton co-op and got ourselves a couple of big porcelain crocks and brewer’s yeast and malt and the rest of the stuff you need and off we went. We were living in a D house at the time and that’s strange, but what happened was that in 1944 the construction in town got to the point where they had more D houses than they needed for families and they knew that some of the professionals in the dormitories would just love to chip together and pay the rent for one and so Roane Anderson set aside a dozen or so D houses on Pasadena Road, East Pasadena Road. They’re still there today and I drive past, I look longingly at 104 Pasadena which was where six of us moved into, all Rochester boys. Roger and I put the crocks together and all the ingredients in the furnace room of this D house, and of course the other four guys in the house were all very supportive. The exact details of the formulation are now gone to my memory, but we had them all written down in a lab notebook, exactly what you’re supposed to do today and every day after and how you monitor this and how you know when it’s ready to bottle and so on. We had all that down pat and we went at this with professional instruments, hygrometers and things like that. And then when we got ready to bottle it we borrowed a bottling machine from somebody, and in the meantime we’d collected almost a two liter bottle. They were big bottles, may have been quarts. But we filtered it out and bottled it and then at the last minute to make sure that we had enough alcohol and that it was not going to be just 6 % but maybe 6.5%, we’d put a little more sugar and then capped the thing up. We had two cases of 12 each and we were very proud of that. The bottles were very pretty, we had them all shined up and polished. No labels of course but we were very proud. This was a two or three week venture. One day came home from Y-12, Roger and I, and the guys, four guys were standing out in the front yard waiting for us and shaking their heads. “Wait till you see the furnace room!” And of course we dashed in there and the place looked like it’d been hit with a small sized atom bomb. Out of 24 bottles 22 of them had exploded and just small pieces of glass all over the furnace room, stuck to the ceiling and the walls. There was beer dripping down on every wall. It was ferocious, and of course after we get through getting teased finally, why we all had a big laugh over it. Guess that extra sugar was just too much for it, and of course Roger said, “Well I’ve got two bottles left, we ought to see what that’s like.” I said, “You better wrap a towel around that fella before you get close to it.” So we did. We wrapped towels around it, but then he popped the cork. Then when he popped the cork there was a stream that came out the exact same diameter as the nozzle of the bottle, and it just went shooting right up to the ceiling and sprayed out. The only beer we ever tasted was what we caught in our hands, and it tasted so lousy we decided that we didn’t need to repeat that experiment. But that was our, Roger went on and he was the manager of Y-12 before Jack was by a couple of years. But Roger did a marvelous job, turned into a suburb manager and was the president of the nuclear division for many, many years and the best man at my wedding, and we had a great time.
A MIGHTY SYMBOL
This is a little silver pin that has a big A on it for atomic bomb, the A bomb, and it was given out by the war department in 1945 a couple of months after the end of the war. And it came with a certificate from secretary of war Patterson, commendation for participating in the Manhattan Project. Everybody got one so it was nothing exclusive with me, it was exclusive to only one degree. The silver pins were restricted to people who had served at least 18 months, and then there was a bronze pin that went to people that served shorter periods of time, so there was that distinction. The pins came, and then there was a large ceremony up at the Blankenship field and secretary of war Patterson was here and General Groves, and we all went up to listen to them and they gave flags to the different installations and to the like the Y-12 and commendations to Stone & Webster who was the construction contractor for Y-12 and for the city.
And then they gave flags to the Clinton laboratories and to K25 and the contractors that built those places.
So it was a formal recognition from the government that they appreciated the untiring efforts of the people that worked on the project. I always felt it was kind of a nice thing to do, but to me it means a great deal more than that. The thing that you have to remember is the context. Here’s a bunch of people that are working their heads off, 72,000 73,000 out of the 75,000 that worked here in Oak Ridge in 1945, didn’t have any idea what was going on. I’d say 72,000 didn’t have any idea, maybe another 1,000 were people like me that had an idea of what we were doing there and a sort of a foggy idea of what it might amount to.
There were probably not more than 1,000 people here that really knew the whole story. They all worked up in the seven wing administration building where Nichols was actually administering the project to all over the country as a chief operating officer for General Nichols. So they of course knew the whole story. But here’s a bunch of people that all of a sudden on August 6 get word of what in the world they have been doing and it was a huge surprise and shock. We were just as thrilled and pleased and surprised as people all over the United States. My goodness, is this what we’ve been doing? And look at the devastation that it caused. The devastation that we caused with Hiroshima was no more, no less than what had been going on all March, all spring. In March of that year when our fire bombers bombed Tokyo, they burned out 16 square miles in downtown Tokyo compared to 4 square miles at Hiroshima. So you can’t look at the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and say this is what the atom bomb meant. The atom bomb meant the end of the war that finally got their reluctant emperor Hiro Hito to go to his diehard militarists and tell them, look you have got to stop this war that you started. Japan can not survive. So that is what the Manhattan Project meant to me and to so many other people. And we were thrilled that what we did here at Y-12 brought that blessed peace to the world that we’d been praying and working so hard to do. So when I look at my bomb pin I think of the blessing it brought to the world that had been agonized for six long years by a war in which 54 million people were killed.
The legacy that came out of it has just been a tremendous blessing to the world at large. The application of nuclear medicine through radio isotopes made at ORNL, our brothers over at X10, and made right here in our beta 3 calutrons gave physicians tools that today are saving lives all over the world. Our enriched uranium is fueling nuclear power plants all over the world, improving the quality of life in countries that don’t have coal and oil and can’t afford them. So when you look at it that way, this is why I cherish that tiny little piece of silver. The other thing that it means to me that people need to understand and frequently they don’t know because there are some people that say, “Oh, I wish the country had never gotten into that. I wish we’d never developed an atomic bomb.” And the fact that you could release the power of the nucleus by splitting it with neutrons was known to everybody, including the Russians, Germans, French, and the British. None of those countries were able because of their resources and their close hand fighting of World War II, none of them were able to devote the resources, the priorities, the money, that the United States did. But every one of them wanted to do it, and since the war every one of them has done it, and it’s not because we did it and they stole our secrets. No, it’s because their scientists are brilliant just like ours are. Their scientists recognized the value of it, and they wanted their country to do it. If we hadn’t done it, the Russians still would have done it and under a dictator like Stalin there’s no question in my mind that they would have won the cold war and we’d be their—they wanted to covert us all to communism, and they could have done it. The thing that saved it is Y-12 and the rest of the nuclear weapons complex contributing to a national nuclear defense system that really kept them at bay and that’s a long answer to your question, but that’s what this little thing means to me.
A MIGHTY SYMBOL (RESTATED)
Well it’s a symbol that just carries a huge load of memories for me. The pins were given out by the war department a couple of months after the Japanese surrender. Secretary of war Patterson and General Groves came down to Oak Ridge and presented excellent awards flags, E award flags to all the contractors and the architect engineers and so on and announced that they were going to be giving pins and certificates to all of the workers on the project, and they came along a couple of months later. The little silver pins were given to people who had worked for the project at least a year and a half. They gave bronze pins to people that worked shortly. So all of us got them, there wasn’t any distinction made between who did what if you were employed, those were the ones who got the pins.
They mean to me though, a great deal more. I remember the day the bomb dropped, August the 6th, the Hiroshima bomb dropped. The way I found out about it, I was working in my lab in the front end of 9206 and all of a sudden I heard somebody running up and down the hall shouting uranium, uranium, uranium! This guy had found out that they dropped the bomb. His wife had called him from the town and told him over the radio, here’s the news, and he was freed from tuballoy, and he just couldn’t wait. It sounded so strange and of course it just horrified all the rest of us. That’s the way we found out about it, we were hard at work. But people often ask me, “How did Oak Ridger’s react?” And since most of the people here had no idea, including me, of exactly when it was going to happen or how big it was going to be, or what else was involved in it in Oak Ridge or in the rest of the country, we didn’t know if were the only people here in dogpatch or what. And so here all the news breaks in the papers that night and tells us what K-25 looked like and X-10 for the first time. So it was a huge surprise revelation to all of us. We were thrilled and delighted. Not by the death of 100,000 people at Hiroshima, no of course not, but in the middle of World War II we were used to horrible atrocities like that week after week after week for six long years. And in March, just a few months before Hiroshima our bombers had killed the same number of people in a fire bombing which is also perfectly horrible and the battle for Iwo Jima had cost lives of 160,000 Japanese troops. War is awful and you don’t look for the answers to the atom bomb by just looking at the ashes of a Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You have to look at the graves on Normandy and Anzio, the Patend death march and the killing of millions of Chinese by Japanese in Nan King. What we were thrilled about is that what we had done here had some part to play in getting their reluctant emperor, Hiro Hito to go to his diehard militarists and tell them you’ve got to stop this war that you’ve started. And so the blessed peace that we had prayed and worked so long and so hard for was finally a blessed reality, and that’s what my little silver pin means to me as far as the end of that war.
But then it carries another message and that is of the legacy of the project that came out of the application of our nuclear science. For instance Y-12’s calutrons were immediately put to work right after the war by researchers that wanted to produce stable isotopes that researchers could use to trace the uptake of fertilizer in plants. And as a result of it the agricultural productivity has just been made manifold times more productive, benefiting people all over the world. Radio isotopes have helped people diagnose and treat cancers, many other applications. Civilian nuclear power has benefited countries all over the world. It means that to me too.
And another aspect that I’m asked about that I find people don’t really appreciate the fact. I heard a fella stand up in a meeting one day where somebody had made a lecture on the Manhattan Project and he said, “You know I worked on the Manhattan Project, and I sometimes wonder if the country was right in even developing the atom bomb.” And nobody answered his question, but I got to thinking about it later and one thing is very clear to me and that is that other countries that now have the bomb didn’t develop them because we did and that they found out how to do it from stealing secrets from us. This whole concept of a release of nuclear energy by bombarding uranium with neutrons was discovered by German scientists in late 1938 and 1939 before World War II started. So it was no secret at all, physicists from Russia and France and Germany, Great Britain, United States all found out about it at the same time and dashed to their laboratories to repeat the experiments, see that could do that too, and they did it on this lab scale, and they started atomic bomb programs in Japan and in Russia and in Germany. But none of those programs went very far and the reason is that they didn’t have a leader like Roosevelt that as convinced that we ought to do it to make sure that we can control this development or at least have it before anybody else does. The other, Russia was so engaged in battling Germany who had attacked their homeland. Japan didn’t have the resources to put into this, and of course France was out of it. Great Britain went to work trying to do it, and their scientists came over here and we exchanged technology for awhile. But the fact of the matter is you see that after the war was over their scientists could go ahead with programs and they did, not in Japan, but they did in Russia and the Russian program was benefited by the fact that a British spy gave them the plans for our trinity device, but the head of the Robert Oppenheimer if you will, of Japan whose name was Kirtchitoff, the head of their head scientist, a brilliant guy. He already knew how to improve on the trinity device and Stalin’s man, Barea who was in charge of the KGB ordered Kirtchitoff not to improve on the trinity device. He didn’t want any excuse for not having a successful weapon task when it went off. So Kirtchitoff had to build that copy of the trinity device which they exploded in 1949. Kirtchitoff and his brilliant crew went right ahead, they developed a mini thermonuclear if you could call it that. It wasn’t a true thermonuclear, but it was a bomb that had many times more explosive power than Hiroshima. And he did that before the United States did. That program under Stalin would have exploded, would have been very successful, if consider what would happen if Stalin had that stockpile of weapons that he built without stealing our plans. They built a gas diffusion plant, later a centrifuge plant and so on and so on. They had a whole thermonuclear stockpile of missiles and so on. What if we had not gone ahead? What if we didn’t have Y-12? It would have been a different world, and it isn’t too dramatic I don’t think to say that we might have a hammer and sickle flying over Washington. The answer to the question is should we not have developed an atomic bomb, the answer is clearly no. The United States is saving the freedoms that have been fought for and died for, for our country and they’ve saved them, preserved them for future generations. We have peace through strength.
ABOUT JACK CASE
I left Y-12 from my Manhattan project days in 1949 and went over to K25, and it was 20 years before I got back to Y-12. When I came back in the 70s I was responsible for the research and development and technical divisions, all the laboratories, both at K25 and at Y-12. The union Carbide management had done the same thing with the technical organizations that they had done with engineering. They had engineering, George Rasney was responsible for engineering in both plants and it made very, very good sense because we could respond to the ebb and flow of production demands, program demands, moving people back and forth, and it was to the benefit of both organizations. But the reason I bring it up is that when I came over here in the 70s I was given an office in 9704-2, upstairs, right across the hall from Jack Case and it was a real honor, not just to have that new responsibilities but also to be in that position, and I had that nice office in the northwest corner upstairs. Jack was in the southeast corner, and he just, he made my job a whale of a lot easier, and as you can imagine if I needed to get into some problem that I had absolutely no idea where to go at Y-12, Jack would set me up. All it took was a phone call and I could get right in. Same thing with the laboratories. When I first went on trips to Los Alamos, Livermore, Jack took me along and introduced me to everybody so he and I always had a wonderful relationship. It was the peak pinnacle of his career, but he was just as easy to talk to as you are. He was, there was nothing stuffy or pretentious about Jack, and I think that’s one reason that you find that everybody has the highest regard and warmest feelings, not just high regard for his ability but beneath it all is sort of a warm feeling. He was a nice guy.
Jack was the longest tenured manager of Y-12, over 15 years. The closest one to him was Gordon Fee at nine years. But Jack had a long tenure at Y-12 as plant manager and was very successful, and no question in my mind but what a good part of his success was his universal appeal from the top brass all the way to the people who were doing the work on the machines because he was one of them. And Y-12’s challenge through the years has always been adapting to the cutting edge of machine tools, work, and we have always had all through our 50 year history, 60 year history we have always had the best machine tools and we’re always trying to push them to the absolute limit and this means the machinists down on the bottom that are doing the work, the guys that are really cutting the parts are continually faced with new machines, new challenges and Jack could make those transitions, make the challenges real to these people and the need for continually changing this and this and this, adapting to statisticians looking over your shoulder and so on, quality certification requirements because he was one of them.
A story that I really cherish is one that came from his very early days in Y-12, I think it was probably 1944 when he, not long after he came here as a machinist and reported for work and the shop foreman said, “Well your record looks like you claim that you have a lot of experience, first class machinist. Let’s see what you can do.” He said, “Here’s a tough, tough job.” He said, “Here’s some tungsten plates. Tungsten plates, and we want an ionic accelerating slip.” I’m sure he didn’t say ionic accelerating slip, but that’s what it was for the calutron. After you bombard the feed material and knock electrons off you’ve got ions, and you have to suck them out with the high voltage so that they go into the calutron and this tungsten would be a material that would hold up with the heat and the bombardment, but it had to have a thin slit in this plate and some of his shop foreman, some of his people had been working on these things. Tungsten is a beast of a material. It’s very brittle and it breaks very, very easily when you machine it and they’d been killing these parts and they had, he said, “Now I have a very limited supply of these tungsten part, and I’ve got to cut this slit in them.” Gave him the dimensions and so on. He said. “See what you can do, but please take it easy with them. Take your time, I know you haven’t done this before.
Some of our guys have been busting these right and left and we just don’t have very many left.”
And Jack said to him, “Yes, I’ll sure try to do that, first I have to make a phone call.” Shop foreman said, “A phone call?” “Yup, got to make a phone call.” So shop foreman gave Jack the traditional lecture on telephones. This was back in the war. There weren’t any telephones in the buildings except in the shop foreman’s office, one telephone. And people were not allowed to use them except for emergency phone calls, certainly not for personal use you know, and here’s this new employee saying he’s got to make a phone call. He figured it’s something urgent. He said, “Well go in my office and use that, but make it snappy.” So he went in and shut the door, glass windows. Shop foreman just forgot him except every once in a while he’d look over through the glass window and here’s jack still there and he’s sitting there writing stuff down and pounding it and shaking his head this way and that way, and he figures he’s really in trouble with his wife or something. Some school principal or doctor or something. Anyway, eventually Jack got done and went out to machine and the shop foreman forgot all about him. And the next day Jack comes into the foreman’s office and he hands him the five plates, each with a beautiful slit in it, the same five plates that the shop foreman had given him and they were perfect. And the shop foreman just was absolutely amazed. He said, “How in the world did you do that!” And he caught himself, he said, wait a minute, I don’t believe I want to know. He took the plates and he left him. What Jack had done was a great friend of everybody and he had called up somebody that he knew somewhere, somewhere in Knoxville that had worked with tungsten and found out how you do it, and the answer is that you don’t machine it at all, you heat the plate up until it’s real hot, you stamp the slot in it, and that’s a typical Jack Case story. When he needed some help he thought about who he could go to and he went to the right person, and the story is thanks to Bob Ellingson, Duke Ellingson who was one of Jack’s supervisors for years and held him in great regard, but he told me that story, and I think it’s quite nice, quite typical.
SAVING Y-12
Y-12’s first mission the one that general Groves gave them, Tennessee Eastman Corporation, was to furnish the highly enriched uranium for the first atomic bomb and Y-12 did it beautifully, very successfully, and their mission really was over at the end of the war. The questions, there were just dozens of questions about whether or not the calutrons were going to be able to do it. Were 1,152 enough?
Each one has to be operated separately and individually, tremendous labor intensive process, the chemistry involved not generally recognized. A huge amount, a huge fraction of the employment was involved in all this chemical recycling that had to be done. And because of the uncertainties in Y-12 Groves right from the beginning decided to put in a back up plant, K-25 which cost just as much, a little bit more than Y-12. Both of them half of a billion dollar plants, nearly 500 million dollars a piece and incredible war time success.
Well K25 instead of being a batch process is continuous. You just stick the stuff in at one end, and it wanders around and after a long, long, long time comes out highly enriched at the other end, but it doesn’t take anywhere near the people. Y-12 at its peak had 22,482 people in May of 1945. K25 half that many and produced the stuff at 10% or so of the cost of Y-12. So Y-12 started shutting down in the fall of ’45 and by the end of ’46 there were about 14,000 people here and on Christmas Eve notices went out to the rest of them, and there were only 2000 of us left in the end of January of ’46. So the question then, the picture then is that K-25 is doing Y-12’s job. By the middle of ’47, well by the end of ’46 after all the people were gone, Tennessee Eastman served notice to the Army that they’d like to be relieved. And that process took into the summer, and it was May that Tennessee Eastman left and Y-12’s 2000 people were taken over by Carbide and Carbon Chemicals who had been operating K-25. The question, what are we going to do?
A small group in beta 3 went to work trying to soup up the calutron so that they could beat K-25 and they tried hard, they made some tremendous improvements, but they were still a long way away.
Other people went to work doing other miscellaneous jobs for Warren or somebody else.
But the real question was does Y-12 have a future and that’s where this Jack Case story comes.
After Tennessee Eastman left in May and Carbide took over, Y-12’s population now is down to about 2000 people. We had 2000 people wondering what we were going to do in the next year. At the same time now out at Los Alamos they were having; the AEC Washington was having some problems with the Los Alamos management because they were very anxious to have Los Alamos produce some other copies of little boy, other copies of fat man. The Los Alamos physicists, the key brains out there that were doing the creative work researching, they wanted very much to continue to explore this nuclear science and to do studies in applying this nuclear science, the physics, write papers, do cross section studies, make new isotopes, evaluate their properties, and so on and so on. They wanted to do research, and the idea of just cranking out Chinese copies of little boy that they already knew how to do did not appeal at all to the top physicist, science structure the pure physicists that were out there. They didn’t have a lot of room to expand production facilities, put up production plants. The kind of people that do that kind of work and the machinists that they had to have and so on, Los Alamos does not really geographically or topographically makes the structure, not just you know. Walter J. Williams, Jack told me, was a guy that used to be in Oak Ridge but had gone to headquarters to work with the AEC. Walter Williams said, “Look we’re having a terrible time out at Los Alamos getting everybody into the act.” Some people out there are willing to do it, there were some SED people that had made the bomb parts, actually the hands on work, and they were happy to do it. But Walter Williams said, “Look we’ve got a huge facility there at Bear Creek Valley in Y-12. They’ve got these fantastic machine shops that supported the calutron operations. They know how to do machining. They’ve got these buildings that we can covert. Why don’t we ask Y-12? Why don’t we put our production mission at Y-12?”
So that idea sparked a visit and Y-12 got told to send a team to Los Alamos to look at how you make bombs, how you make bomb parts and safety precautions you have to use and criticality. Learn how to do that and think about setting it up at Y-12. And it turns out that that team was Jack Case. Representing the machining part of the business, Whimpy Hilton from Tool Design and Doctor John Strohecker from Engineering. A great team, but isn’t it interesting that Jack was right there at that time in July, and John Strohecker told me the story just in 1997 when I was trying to get my little chronology together. John Strohecker said, “Yeah well that was an interesting trip. Jack and Whimpy and I went out there, and we had the name of somebody that had set up the clearances, and we got out there the first day and they took us through their top secret shops. We saw all the parts, we saw how they put them together, and we just, in that general orientation that morning we just figured, boy, hey, that’s something good for Y-12.” About noon somebody blew the whistle on them up the line, jerked their clearances and kicked them out of the plant, all three of them. Hauled them out and set them down outside. You ca go get rooms in Santa Fe or something, and we’ll try to get this straightened out, except they didn’t want to straighten it out, they wanted them out. Well it’s from the group of people that Jack said that, John Strohecker said he and Jack and Whimpy spent three to four weeks out there. I said, “What were you doing?” He said, “Well we were phoning Oak Ridge trying to tell them to get somebody to work to get to Washington to call down here and straighten this mess out.” They were also on the phones talking to their spouses back here and they did a lot of hiking. They went to Bandolier and they went up to the Caldera and they just went all over the area soaking up the thing, they spent time in Santa Fe, they hiked and they sightseed for three or four weeks, and finally somebody made all the connections from headquarters and so on and so on and they got back in, and they came back to Oak Ridge and had with them then the understanding of the processes.
Strohecker was a brilliant chemical engineer and did a lot of the design work, for example in 9207, did all the design work for that hafnium zirconium separation process, very good man. So Jack and John Whimpy came back to Oak Ridge with the information, and taught us how to do tow things we didn’t know how to do before, and one was the reduction of the uranium green salt which we knew how to make and which was our product all through the war, but reduce that to metal, uranium metal, into a button and then something you could melt, cast, roll, form and then machine. And Jack is the one that brought back the machining information. Jack Case is the one that brought back the information of how you could put hoods around machines so that you could safely machine uranium and then suck the air out so that you didn’t have any dust which might catch fire or so that you didn’t have any dust that you had to worry about breathing and the proper kinds of lubricants that you can use for your tools. So Jack brought back that information, helped build a new machine shop so that we could machine uranium, and John Strohecker brought back the information about the chemistry so that we could start producing uranium metal and then machine it. It was actually the fall of ’47 we actually started doing some machine parts, and we started then taking the product K-25 U06 and actually processing it. And that started Y-12 off on its second era, what I call its second era, it’s second mission, and it got us into the real heart of the nuclear fuel cycle. It took us a few years to work into that. The stamp that pulled us in as an integral part of the nuclear weapons complex happened in 1950 when we got the assignment to separate the lithium 6 from the lithium 7 isotopes needed for the thermonuclear weapon. Then we did that, did a marvelous job with that in the mid 1950s to mid 60s, and that was a tremendous success. I call that our second Manhattan project because we just dropped everything to get that done in alpha 4, alpha 5 and many other buildings and Y-12, but that got us into the being considered as really an integral part. They couldn’t get along without us, and we had really an integrated system here from the standpoint of building components for the nuclear weapons system and also having the capability of being able to design, come up with device parts for testing, nuclear testing that the labs were doing. So we were always working with brand new parts.

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BILL WILCOX
WAR WORK
Well I graduated from Washington Lee College in 1943, Washington Lee University 1943 in May and got a job with the Manhattan Project up in Detroit at an American Chemical Society meeting. I’d had a degree in college in chemistry, and the head of the department sent me to the ACS meeting and said, “You guys go and just register. Then you’ll have interviews with people.” I knew that I wanted something to do with some vital war work, and so I put that on my resume at the top of the sheet. Of course it was in the middle of World War II. This was May of 1943, and many of our classmates had gone into the service and, we all wanted to do something to help win the war. I ended up with 18 different interviews at the ACS meeting. I was amazed. I had never been; I didn’t have a great deal of self confidence at the time and I just thought, my gracious sakes! The first interview I had was with a very impressive older looking gentleman from Heinz Company in Pittsburgh and it turns out he wanted me to do vitamin C, ascorbic acid analyses of tomatoes in the tomato soup and juice production lines. I said, “That sounds like that will be interesting work, but I really want something to do with the war.” But when I look back on it after the war and found out what the Manhattan Project was like, I could identify 12 of the 18 interviews that would have gotten me somewhere into the war because of Kelex. I had a Kelex interview and an interview with Ames Iowa who was doing the uranium processing and so on and so on.
But the one that interested me most was the Eastman Kodak interview and there again it was kind of, I said, “Will this be vital war work?” And they said, “Yes indeed. Son, I’ve looked at your resume, and I think that we might be very interested in you. We’re hiring a number of technical people.” And I said, “I like Eastman Kodak’s reputation. What kind of work will it be?” He said, “It would be war work.” I said, “No, I said, I’m a chemist, what kind of chemistry will it involve?” “Well I can’t tell you. It’s secret.” I said, “Well, will it be in Rochester, NY?” “No, no, it won’t be.” “Well where in the country will it be?” “Well I can’t tell you. It’s secret.” And on and on, this interview went on for ten minutes and all he would tell me is nothing, how long will it last and will I have a job after the war and son on. So I didn’t really see anything to object to. So I told him yes, I’d really welcome an offer. I was hired and got a telegram to come to Rochester, NY on May the 26th and that was my official hire date, May the 26th.
He told us when we got there, the gentleman that interviewed me and my lab partner, Paul Blakely, also from Washington Lee, very formidable gentleman, three piece suit, black vest, tie, balding, Doctor J.G. McNally who ended up as the number two man at Y12. He was Doctor Conklin’s operations manager. He was the technical brains behind the chemistry and the business here at Y12 which was a huge part. But Doctor McNally introduced us to the project and welcomed us to Eastman Kodak and he said, “Gentlemen,” he said, “as chemists you need to know that you’ll be working on uranium, but that is the last time you will hear that word or use that word until the war is over.” Paul and I were both sitting there sort of holding our knuckles down. He said you will be calling it tuballoy and all of the compounds of uranium that you work with you will call by it’s proper name, combining name with tuballoy, like tubineal oxide, tubineal chloride, tubineal tetrachloride and so on and so on. Said if you use that name in writing or in talking during the war you will be subject to immediate discharge and possible persecution and so on and so on. That was our introduction.
Well we did not know of course that Oak Ridge at that time, May of ’43, was still being cleared of farms and roads were being built and fences and they were hard at work starting to build the town. But up there in Rochester we worked in Kodak Park laboratories, there were about 50 of us that had come from colleges all over the country. Chemical engineers and chemists, physicists, they were looking for the people that would end up being the front line supervisors and their staffs, Eastman Kodak’s, research people ended up as our bosses here at Y12. We referred to it all that summer as we worked in locked laboratories on uranium processing methods. We worked with each other in small groups, and we learned the meaning of the words need to know, and Jack Borcey and Roger Gibbs and I knew what we had to do in our laboratory but down the hall where Paul Blakely worked and worked on analytical methods, we didn’t talk, even outside, we were told that we were not to be curious about what others were doing, and they wouldn’t talk.
So that was the start to our introduction to security. We had a fascinating time that summer, of course we were all out of college, and we were all getting paychecks for the first time.
DOGPATCH, USA
The work that we were doing that summer in the labs on tuballoy, of course to us the uranium chemistry was all brand new and yet it became very apparent to us very quickly that there was a complete absence of information in the recorded literature about uranium. We asked for a textbook. There aren’t any.
Do we have any consultants in uranium chemistry? No, there aren’t any. We’re developing our own uranium chemistry, we had one book that was a paperbound book on the rare elements, and they were all in there and uranium was just one of them that was mentioned, three or four pages of uranium chemistry, but that’s what we were doing that summer was developing an understanding of uranium, how you detect it in solutions or how you purify it in particularly and it became very apparent that we were interested in an extremely valuable material. So it wasn’t before the end of the summer that we had pretty much understood that we were working on with uranium isotopes and with precious uranium 235 and speculated that it was for purposes of some kind of military weapon, but we didn’t know any details, and we weren’t furnished with any information about that.
We knew we were not going to stay there. We knew we were going to some other place and all through the summer we referred to it as dogpatch form the Lil Abner cartoon. We just assumed it was going to be back in the sticks somewhere because we’d ask questions of our bosses. You know is it going to be on the west coast? Don’t think so. Will it be on the east coast? Don’t think so. But we had no idea where it was going to be and it was just fortuitous that we started picking that name and referring to it as dogpatch, eventually we were going to go there. And about August or so they started talking about us going next week, or a couple of weeks from now or something like that and that schedule kept getting slipped and slipped and slipped.
We finally all came down here in October, the end of October. The notice we got I think was less than a week or so, and as you could imagine we greeted it with something less than enthusiasm. A lot of the girls that we’d been dating that summer had already gone back to college so that made it a little easier on us, but we really enjoyed our life up there in Rochester, it’s a nice city, lots of advantages. We lived downtown at the YMCA. But we came down here. Most of the guys got railroad tickets for Knoxville, Tennessee and that was our first clue. Oh, we’re going to Knoxville, Tennessee, and we flew to the library to read about Knoxville. One of the boys up there, I bet you the only one out of 50, was a Rochester native and was the fortunate owner of an automobile, and he was going to drive down here. Earl was his name, and I flipped a coin right and I ended up with a seat in his car. There were five of us and we drove down, took a couple of days. But I remember that first night in Knoxville, we got to Knoxville, I thought it looked like—it was raining, it was dark, it was dismal, it was chilly. We ended up in a fleabag hotel back down some narrow back street, I don’t know how we ever got there. It’s long since been torn down fortunately, and then the next day we drove up and came up Old Solway road to the Solway entrance and that was our introduction to Oak Ridge.
It was a shock to get here. Everything was brand new, everything was wood, everything was bustling, there was construction going on everywhere. They were putting up this building, that building, and so on. The roads just had a thin coat of gravel on them, but they were dirt roads and we came in and ended up at the T.E.C. employment building in Oak Ridge which is the Tennel building now, down on the turnpike and they told us to go up the street and get a dormitory room and report to Y-12 the next morning.
Well where’s Y-12? Well you go up to the bus station and you get on a bus that says Y-12. Do you understand that? Yes, we understand that. Okay. The bus station of course when we got there had these strange code names that made absolutely no sense to us, but they were all administration areas, X10, K25, Y12, and it was easy to get around, you just went with the flow.
But the dorm room, we got a dorm room, and we were very pleased with our dorm room.
It was, as I said it was just brand new and it had this gorgeous new furniture in it, gorgeous because we’d been living in the downtown YMCA in Rochester and the furniture was 1910 I guess, with cigarette burns everywhere, and you know the beds had sagging mattresses and everything else. These were brand new, you know, nice, beautiful, we thought, beautiful bed spreads and so on.
Everything was wooden, door knobs, the lamp stands and everything, the knobs on all the dressers and so on, everything was wood, but it was all clean and nice, and we couldn’t complain about the rent, it was $10 a month. We thought that was reasonable. But then in a couple of days we found out that we had to get a third person in our double room which was, the room was about this big you know and just room enough for two beds but they came in and took out the one bed and put in a double bunk bed, and I slept up on top of that for the first few months. They were jammed for rooms. Our dormitory number was M3, and I remember Paul and I standing out there on the porch saying, “Do these things mean anything or are they just artificial numbers?” He said, “Just look across the street there.” There were four dormitories right across the street and nothing in them but girls, and it was W 56, W7. He says, “I’ll bet you a dollar that that M stands for men.” My gosh, that’s a great observation, let’s go walk around town, and so by the time we ended up in the cafeteria at night we had wondered around the townside and we counted up to 10 women’s dormitories and only five men’s dormitories. We figured that that was a pretty good ratio. So our first introduction to the town, of course as young single guys, I’m sure it was different from our bosses that came down and lived in special houses albums, but for us that was, you know it was very nice.
Y12 when we got here, we got to 9203. Paul and I were both chemists, and it was the first chemistry building finished. I say first without claiming too much, 9202 next door was finished just about the same time.9202 was intended to be the bulk treatment facility is what we called it and it did all the chemistry that was necessary to get the feed material for the alpha calutrons, and 9203 right next door was the chemistry building that was supposed to take the pockets that came out of alpha, the product pockets and wash them, get the uranium out of it and then have other people in that same building, 9203, purify it, and get it converted back from some solution that they used to wash it out with, turn it back into uranium tetrachloride as feed for the beta units.
So 9203 was initially planned as the beta chemistry building and 9202 as the alpha chemistry building. And this Rochester contingent was divided between those two buildings. 9203 in addition to recovering the product from the alpha units, and processing it to uranium tetrachloride was also the home of the analytical chemistry for the whole group under Charlie Thornton
REFINING Y-12
The front end of the building next to the analytical laboratories was all set apart for the isotopic analysis for Y12 and then there were offices across the front end before you got to the change house.
It’s sort of incredible to us today that anybody thought we could do all the alpha chemistry in 9202 and all the beta chemistry as well as the analytical labs and the isotopic analysis in one little relatively small building. The explanation for that is that at the time 9202 and 03 were built, Y12 was thought to involve maybe three alpha buildings and two beta buildings and all through that period, 1943 out at Los Alamos what was going on was that the theoretical physicists were sitting around scratching their heads about just what the critical mass was going to be. So how much of this 235 did they need? And every time they did a new set of calculations and thought about new problems, the critical mass would get a little bit larger. So then Oppenheimer would tell Groves that Y-12 needs to be a little bit bigger.
XAX and XBX down in 9731, during this period, October/November, they started up in October/November of 1943, they started running alpha units, and we soon in 9202 got some of the alpha pockets out of the 9731 XAX and started doing experiments with, instead of what we call cold uranium up in Rochester, absolutely nothing was enriched of course, but instead of working with cold uranium to work out our chemistry processes for purifying this stuff, we could actually start working on something that was enriched. It was enriched very small amounts but nevertheless we kept very, very careful, took very, very extraordinary precautions to make sure. For example we used a glass beaker or Florence flasks or something. We always had a stainless steel can to put them in. We had stainless steel cans made for all of our glass equipment so that if we had an accident we wouldn’t lose anything. We were still working with very, very low enrichments up through February of 1944. But these were very small buildings and when we got the first material ready, Los Alamos, I never knew this of course down in my lab, but what was going on was that Oppenheimer’s people were dying to get their hands on some enriched uranium in quantities so they could start doing experiments to really determine just exactly what this critical mass was. And of course Groves was very anxious too. So he’s beating on us to get the production out, and Oppenheimer’s people are just waiting for it anxiously, and the first calutron really alpha calutron got started up in November, late in November of ’43 and it turned out to be a disaster, as the history books tell us. The magnet shorted out and it was just, it was just a total flop. They hadn’t had a chance to really work out all of the problems in XAX, and so it’s no surprise when the production units got together first time any of these things had been tried that they had trouble. But it was; they had to send the magnets back to Milwaukee to Alice Chandlers and change the gap spacing and change the way the oil was purified so that it didn’t have foreign materials in it that caused these electrical shorts. General Groves just went berserk over this thing but the “pipeline”, the “pipeline” of equipment that was being build by Alice Chandlers and so on, they were trying to build calutrons as fast as they could, so that as soon as they detected that there was this problem with magnet gaps and contaminated oil, they immediately took steps to fix the problem so that we didn’t just take the old stuff out and send it back and have it fixed and sent back. We ripped that stuff out and put these new units in. So that in January by the end of January the first of the brand new units with proper spacing and cleanliness started operating and turning out small amounts of low enriched uranium, ten to fifteen percent from alpha, and that stuff started coming over to 9202 and we started cleaning those and purifying the material. That’s where my gang all worked. I was in the labs in the back end of the building that took the solution from the cleaning of the pockets across the hall, and we took it. It was then contaminated with copper and iron and nickel and so on from stainless steel parts that they washed, and we had to purify it with ether extraction and turn it into U03, and then it went next door up the hall in 9202 and the guys took the U03, reduced it to U02 and chlorinated it to UCL5 with carbon tetrachloride, and then they sublimed it to UCL4 and loaded into pockets for the beta calutrons.
CLOSE CALL
The production lines started cranking up there in January and February. Los Alamos was dying for stuff. The first real batch that we put together was about 200 grams of uranium oxide ready to go to Los Alamos as the oxide, and I actually had my hands on that. I was in charge of purifying one step of that, not the whole thing, but it had to come through my laboratory back there in 9202, and it was responsible for me getting closer to getting fired than I ever got in my life. We had no idea where it was going, Los Alamos. The word was from my boss and from his boss who came and talked to us, followed the 200 grams all through the cycle, how are we doing? Will it be done by 3:00 this afternoon? Is there anyway we can get it done by 2:00 and so on and so on. Are you sure you’re not going to lose any? Yup, yup, yup. I had no idea what the enrichment was, had no idea it was going to Los Alamos, this was all stuff that I’ve been able to overlay afterwards, but I knew it was very important, and I had to get it very, very pure and make sure I didn’t lose anything. My job that one afternoon was to filter it out on a Buchner funnel and suck it through there and collect it on this filter paper and then cal sign it from UO4 which we precipitated it as, turn it into U03. All I had to do was; I got it out, and I got it all filtered. Oh it was a beautiful, looks like lemon, U04 as it’s precipitated, uranium from a solution with hydrogen peroxide and it looks just like a lemon cheesecake. It’s a gorgeous color. Lemon pudding is what it looks like, very, very pretty. And then when you cal sign it, it burns, turns into U03 and that’s a nice finely grained yellow powder, a very, very pretty orangey powder, and so I had it down, nice lemon custard in the Buchner funnel, fill the paper here, that thing here, had it sitting in a cup, a nickel cup, and there’s a bead around the glass Buchner funnel, just a little bead around the lip to increase it’s strength or something. It caught on the rims of this nickel cup and I thought, well that’s fine, that means it won’t, at the bottom the thing will not be talking about the bottom, and we’d get some kind of too hot.
Well I put it in the oven, and I went home and turned on the timer, and when I came in the next morning I was ready to get the 200 grams out and take it to the next step of the processing. We’re going to package it up somehow in containers to send out to Los Alamos. I didn’t know where, but we were going to package it up and send it to somebody. So I went in with a light heart and took my galoshes off, or shoes, or whatever it is, rubbers. We always had to take our shoes off in the change house and change into some kind of work clothes because the building was spotlessly clean. And one of my friends came over and said, “Hey Bill, anything happen last night?” I said, “Yes, we did our job I think.” He said, “Well the word is out that Doctor Ballard is looking for you, and I suspect from the way he was talking that it isn’t going to be to give you any raise.” He said, “As a matter of fact I’d suggest that you just sort of go to your laboratory by a side route if you can.” Well, I just can’t imagine. So I went back to the lab, stood a little bit, and I said, “I can’t stand this.” So I went up to talk to my boss, direct boss. Ballard’s one up the line. And I said, “Harlow, anything wrong?” He said, “Sure is!” I said, “What in the world, what happened?” He said, “Did you calsign that oxide last night?” I said, “Yeah I did.” “Did you put it in a nickel container like you’re supposed to?” Sorry I misspoke it was stainless steel. “Yes sir, sure did.” He said, “You know what happened?” He said, “That stainless steel container grew as you put it in the furnace, and it got hot and expanded and that Buchner funnel that fit just on top with a little bead just holding it, that just dropped right down in and when the furnace went off and it cooled off that stainless steel came down and crushed that and now that precious material is all mixed up with that sand in the filter. It’s a fritted filter glass, and we’ve got to reprocess that. It’s going to cost us a full day at least. “Oh, I’ll be glad to do that.” “You keep your hands off of that!” He says, “You’re not to even go in that room.” And he says, “If Ballard gets a hold of you you’re going to get canned.” I said, “Oh my gosh.” I said, “I’m so sorry, I can see what happened now.” He says, “We see what happened too!” I didn’t see Ballard for another day or two, but I finally did see him and he said, “I wasn’t really mad at you.” A couple of months later I lost $50 to him in a poker game, and we got back on reasonably good ground. But that was touch and go. That’s as close as I ever came, that I know of. That just gives you a little feel for how intense it was, how hard we worked. Actually that wasn’t any horrible big deal, but there was, you know, it cost us time. But that eventually the 200 grams did get out to Los Alamos, and they did some physics experiments and helped refine their estimate.
MORE BUILDINGS
In the spring of ’44 when this is going on, in the spring the new estimates made it obvious that 9202, 9203 just couldn’t do the job, and we’re adding other alpha buildings. We’re adding other beta buildings and these are just completely inadequate. So the answer to the expansion of 9202 was 9211, 9207 across the street. The whole bulk treatment operations getting oxide in from Mallencrot in Saint Louis and converting it to, going through the steps U02 to UCL5 and UCL4 uranium purification for alpha and the answer to 9203 for the beta chemistry was 9206 and so Stolen Webster was put to work on crash basis and 9206 was finished by that summer 1944, and we all moved down there. Turned the building 9202 over to the analytical people, and it wasn’t anywhere near big enough for that. So the analytical people ended up in 9733-4 and -3. The analytical, by the next year that wasn’t big enough and they moved up, you know 9212, 9998, and so that’s kind of the sequence of those buildings. Actually before the 9207, 9211 really got into action, the war was over, and so they were turned over to ORNL biology division.
But those early days were just—we worked our tail off. We worked very, very hard and long, long hours. We changed things very, very quickly if we came up with a better process. The process that we worked at in Rochester which involved precipitation processes and electrolytic cells with mercury that we started with down in 9202, somebody came along, I think it was from Brown University, with an ether extraction process, and we changed that work that we’d done, spent five months on up in Rochester. We got the word we’re going to change it to ether extraction, and we were doing ether extraction in a couple of weeks. I mean people came in there night and day and ripped stuff out and put in new stuff and that’s the way it was all over Y-12. We didn’t waste time doing any kind of sitting around naval contemplating and no paper studies and so on. If a new method came along and it really looked like it was going to get something done faster, get it done!
My boss, I’ll never forget the date at the end of the war. When he left, he gathered all of his flock together, guys that he’d mentored and had done the front line supervising through the war, and he gave us a Dutch Uncle talk that I’ll never forget. He said. “Now, I want you to know that the way you’ve been doing things around here is not the way that they do things in industry, and you got the biggest shock coming in your life when you go to work for anybody outside. In the first place, you’ve been used to bringing up a piece of scrap paper with a list of things on it that you want ordered, and you give it to Sally out here and the stuff shows up at the dock.” He said, “In industry they have something called a purchase requisition.” He said, “You’ve never heard of that before.” And he explained purchase requisitions, and then he gave us a lecture on budgeting. He gave us a lecture on accounting, and we’d never heard anything like that. The stock room, the down in the east end of the plant, the warehouses, you just got in your pickup truck and you went down there and the stuff was in bins. Florence flasks, condensers, glass condensers, this and that, everything else, hot plates, stirring motors, stands for equipment, and you just put it in your cart, your buggy, or whatever you had, your basket, and you went back to the lab. The Manhattan Project had a blank check which was one of the reasons they succeeded. It had top priority. They could get stuff when you couldn’t, everybody else couldn’t get it, triple A priority. But of course we did accommodate after the war, and we did learn the rules but it was very, very different at Y-12.
One of the things I remember was that I got a call from the boss, Brigham’s secretary and she said, “You’re supposed to go to a building, 9704-2 at 10:00 tomorrow morning.” Room such and such. I forget. And talk to Mr. So and so. Can’t remember his name. And I said, “What about?” I said, “I’ve never been there before.” You always had to ask because you had passes in your wallet and on your badge as to where you could go and who you could talk to. The badge, if it said, A, B, C, or D you knew what you could talk to somebody about with verifying their clearance or without going to check with their supervisor. But I had passes, I could get in XAX and XBX the first year I was there. I never went, too busy to go. But I had a pass to get in XAX, XBX, and that’s of course is because that’s where the pockets were coming from. But I couldn’t get into any of the alpha buildings or beta buildings and so on and so on. Anyway, I went up there the next day, and he was—he welcomed me, he said, “We’re concerned about the attitudes of people towards the country. We want, this is an extremely important project and we want to be certain that everybody is just as interested in its success as you are.” I said, “Well pleasure around.” I said, “What can I do to help?” He said, “Keep your eyes open. If you hear somebody running down the government or questioning authority or asking too many questions that you know that they shouldn’t be asking, how about letting us know?” I said, “Well, sure, be glad to.” He said, “Well here’s a stack of envelopes and a stack of cards. I appreciate you sending me one every week if you have anything to report just write no report on the card, stick it in there and send it to me.” Address in Knoxville, Acme Credit Company, all rubber stamped, and he gave me a bunch of these. I appreciate very, very much. How you feel about what’s going on? I said, “Well it’s busy. The guys I’m working with are really working hard, and I haven’t heard any problems except that one that I heard about last week.” He said, “Well what was that?” I said, “I’m sure you must know about it. It was that guy that was spouting off from Canada about our country, and all of us were kind of surprised at how vocal he was but we were all surprised too that he wasn’t there the next day.” He said, “Well just keep your eyes open.” I said, “Fine.” I did it all through the war, never talked to anybody that did it. I didn’t know why I was picked.
But at the second meeting of the 43 club in 1957 or 8 or something Ken Dunbar was the president then, and we had some kind of a meeting down at the cafeteria in town, and somebody got up and made this point, he said he just wondered if anybody else had ever been involved in the Acme Credit Company thing.
And Dunbar said, “Well okay, let’s see, let’s see. Is anybody else involved in that?” I’d say 25%, 30% of the people in the room held up their hands. Wartime rules are very, very different and in that war everybody felt very, very much like they were a part of it. They shared the sacrifices, they shared the shortages of food, tires, gasoline rationing, cigarettes, everything. Price controls which common culture today just wouldn’t even think of, but in a war time situation that culture was entirely different, and we were all trying hard to be patriots.
CONSEQUENCE OF HORSEPLAY
The guys that went to Rochester, that first college group, of course got to be good friends that summer in Rochester. It was a nice bunch. It was eclectic. There were people from all over the country, different colleges and universities and different, but we were all interested in the same thing you know.
And we were kids too. It’s amazing that we did what we did. I was 20 and most of them were 21 or 22.
But we had wash bottles, chemists, we had taken an earl meyer flask stopper and a hook neck with a rubber bulb, so that you could wash out beakers, make sure that you got all of the solution out, you’d wash it out with distilled water. Now these wash bottles make very good squirters and when somebody wasn’t looking you could squirt them, and we had girls in the labs too, but that came under the heading of horse play, and we thought it was of course perfectly innocent. What in the hell? We’re chemists, we’re not going to put ammonia in the bottle or hurt anybody. But a decree went out, no horse play. It might cause accidents, as part of the safety thing. And that’s true. I got that thing up there one afternoon, and the next day here comes one of my Rochester buddies down the hall chasing a girl, chasing a laboratory technician who happened to be female (squirt, squirt) back of her neck, both of them laughing like the world, and here’s Ballard coming out of the—. She just sort of comes close to him, couple feet away you know. Well it was so obvious, and so they couldn’t help but do anything and my buddy, he got axed. He didn’t get fired. He got moved to another part of the plant, but we all felt that was carrying things a little too far. You know it’s sort of, we were all very sorry for him because he was a hell of a good guy and brilliant chemical engineer, and was really vitally needed, but you know. So we did have discipline like that and as well as watching for people that were disloyal or that we thought were.
CHRISTMAS CHUG
The first Christmas that the Rochester gang was here Oak Ridge town shape was pretty well fixed.
They had a lot of dormitories to add on and so on, but the semestoes were mostly finished construction, the townsite and so on and so on. And yet we were, as I said, in the middle of the war, and none of us, my own Pennsylvania and some of these guys in Rochester, some of them in Indiana, none of us could go home for Christmas so it was a blue time. And the thing that made it blue, blue was that the gals that we had been dating all fall, our good friends, turned out most of them were Tennesseans and they all evaporated for Christmas. So they weren’t even here. The one mistake that the army engineers made in picking out the site in the mind of us young folks was that both of the counties that they located the reservation in were bone dry as far as liquor laws go, and you just couldn’t get a drink anywhere. Not that we were alcoholics, but we wanted to celebrate occasionally, and all you could drink was 3.2% beer, called Barbarossa Beer at the rec. halls. And you could drink that all night long, all it did was give you a lot of exercise. The Rochester crew though had gotten word before we came to dogpatch that it was bone dry so a couple of us had squirreled some booze. I had a little bottle of Imperial whiskey, but it was a pint. That was nothing.
That didn’t even last through the month of October. But Bob McPherson, one of my best friends in Rochester had squirreled away a bottle of Champagne. We didn’t know anything about it. But we’re all sitting around after eating at the army cafeteria Christmas Eve and feeling sorry for ourselves and he said, “You know boys, I got a bottle of champagne.” He says, “I think what we ought to do is just sort of have ourselves a Christmas toast.” So we went back to M3 dormitory, went up front and there was a water cooler and a tube of those conical shaped white cups. We each got one of those and he popped the cork with ceremony and we all stood around there. There were about five of us I guess, and he poured somebody a drink. I don’t know who it was, but he ford it to him and then he started pouring the other one, and by the time he got this one half poured, this one was on the floor. It turned out that the champagne was a marvelous solvent for whatever little glue there was that held that cup as a cone, and so we said, “Well, we’re going to make the best of a bad situation.” We all got fresh cups and he poured it as fast as he could and we just chug-a-lugged it. The last time I’ve ever, first time and last that I’ve ever chug-a-lugged champagne, but we just drank it down like that and all said, “Merry Christmas” and that was that.
And the next day, I don’t remember if we had Christmas day off or not, but that’s how we celebrated our first Christmas.
RECREATION IN OAK RIDGE
Our work was, you know, most of us worked at least ten hours everyday and worked hard at what we were doing, tried to do it better than we did the day before, faster. And in our case the chemists doing these re-purifications to get it as pure as we could each time, each stage so we didn’t have to re-purify it twice. We worked hard and accomplished a great deal during those days, but after work when we went home we had—the benevolent dictatorship we had here, the, army had recognized that they had loads of perpetual people here, people here that had lived in university towns all over the country or big cities like Rochester and wanted the finer things in life, realizing that this is an army base. Well it really didn’t look anything like an army base except that it was new and we had all these security restrictions. They set up something called a recreation department which really did a spectacular job when I look back on it.
They just fostered all kinds of sporting activities and if you had any inclination to want to start a club, a African violet society or a knitting society, a quilting society, a debating society, as well as bowling leagues and so on, tennis leagues, archery leagues, civil air patrol, they were all there going in the fall when we got there. And they just kept building up, chorus, community chorus, playhouse and so on. So there was lots of activity in the evenings. Lots of guys, lots of gals, 13,000 singles here, and they had what they called recreation halls, big one at Townsite, big one at Grove center, big one at Jefferson a big one in Midtown, and they had dances there, disc jockeys playing big band music on records, and we congregated there and in each of the rec. halls they had bridge rooms and so on. There were lots of things to do. Singles all went to the movies at the center theater in Townsite, the movies changed four times a week which means that we saw four movies a week, and we went to Grove and saw movies and Jefferson and so on and so there was just lots to do outside of work hours. None of it involved talking about what you were doing. You’d never ask somebody. You might ask them what plants they worked at, but beyond that you never asked what they did. The question everybody asked was, “Where are you from?” And that got us off on other geographic discussions. Well don’t you know Will Jones? He went to college and so on. But nevertheless we had, there weren’t any fences on the top of Black Oak Ridge which was neat, and on Sundays we would hike over Black Oak Ridge down on G Road to G Road go over Marlow and hike all through the countryside. Of course the Docit tunnel was one of our key springs, one of our nice Sunday afternoon objectives. I only walked through the Docit tunnel once and that was real fast, but of course we all had to do that at least once.
TROUBLE BREWING
But one afternoon Roger Hibbs and I, a good friend from Rochester were sitting around saying, “You know, we’re chemists and we ought to be able to brew some decent beer instead of this 3.2%. We don’t know how to do it, but we know how to read the literature. Let’s do it.” So we read up on the literature and we weren’t the only people in town making home brew and went over to Clinton co-op and got ourselves a couple of big porcelain crocks and brewer’s yeast and malt and the rest of the stuff you need and off we went. We were living in a D house at the time and that’s strange, but what happened was that in 1944 the construction in town got to the point where they had more D houses than they needed for families and they knew that some of the professionals in the dormitories would just love to chip together and pay the rent for one and so Roane Anderson set aside a dozen or so D houses on Pasadena Road, East Pasadena Road. They’re still there today and I drive past, I look longingly at 104 Pasadena which was where six of us moved into, all Rochester boys. Roger and I put the crocks together and all the ingredients in the furnace room of this D house, and of course the other four guys in the house were all very supportive. The exact details of the formulation are now gone to my memory, but we had them all written down in a lab notebook, exactly what you’re supposed to do today and every day after and how you monitor this and how you know when it’s ready to bottle and so on. We had all that down pat and we went at this with professional instruments, hygrometers and things like that. And then when we got ready to bottle it we borrowed a bottling machine from somebody, and in the meantime we’d collected almost a two liter bottle. They were big bottles, may have been quarts. But we filtered it out and bottled it and then at the last minute to make sure that we had enough alcohol and that it was not going to be just 6 % but maybe 6.5%, we’d put a little more sugar and then capped the thing up. We had two cases of 12 each and we were very proud of that. The bottles were very pretty, we had them all shined up and polished. No labels of course but we were very proud. This was a two or three week venture. One day came home from Y-12, Roger and I, and the guys, four guys were standing out in the front yard waiting for us and shaking their heads. “Wait till you see the furnace room!” And of course we dashed in there and the place looked like it’d been hit with a small sized atom bomb. Out of 24 bottles 22 of them had exploded and just small pieces of glass all over the furnace room, stuck to the ceiling and the walls. There was beer dripping down on every wall. It was ferocious, and of course after we get through getting teased finally, why we all had a big laugh over it. Guess that extra sugar was just too much for it, and of course Roger said, “Well I’ve got two bottles left, we ought to see what that’s like.” I said, “You better wrap a towel around that fella before you get close to it.” So we did. We wrapped towels around it, but then he popped the cork. Then when he popped the cork there was a stream that came out the exact same diameter as the nozzle of the bottle, and it just went shooting right up to the ceiling and sprayed out. The only beer we ever tasted was what we caught in our hands, and it tasted so lousy we decided that we didn’t need to repeat that experiment. But that was our, Roger went on and he was the manager of Y-12 before Jack was by a couple of years. But Roger did a marvelous job, turned into a suburb manager and was the president of the nuclear division for many, many years and the best man at my wedding, and we had a great time.
A MIGHTY SYMBOL
This is a little silver pin that has a big A on it for atomic bomb, the A bomb, and it was given out by the war department in 1945 a couple of months after the end of the war. And it came with a certificate from secretary of war Patterson, commendation for participating in the Manhattan Project. Everybody got one so it was nothing exclusive with me, it was exclusive to only one degree. The silver pins were restricted to people who had served at least 18 months, and then there was a bronze pin that went to people that served shorter periods of time, so there was that distinction. The pins came, and then there was a large ceremony up at the Blankenship field and secretary of war Patterson was here and General Groves, and we all went up to listen to them and they gave flags to the different installations and to the like the Y-12 and commendations to Stone & Webster who was the construction contractor for Y-12 and for the city.
And then they gave flags to the Clinton laboratories and to K25 and the contractors that built those places.
So it was a formal recognition from the government that they appreciated the untiring efforts of the people that worked on the project. I always felt it was kind of a nice thing to do, but to me it means a great deal more than that. The thing that you have to remember is the context. Here’s a bunch of people that are working their heads off, 72,000 73,000 out of the 75,000 that worked here in Oak Ridge in 1945, didn’t have any idea what was going on. I’d say 72,000 didn’t have any idea, maybe another 1,000 were people like me that had an idea of what we were doing there and a sort of a foggy idea of what it might amount to.
There were probably not more than 1,000 people here that really knew the whole story. They all worked up in the seven wing administration building where Nichols was actually administering the project to all over the country as a chief operating officer for General Nichols. So they of course knew the whole story. But here’s a bunch of people that all of a sudden on August 6 get word of what in the world they have been doing and it was a huge surprise and shock. We were just as thrilled and pleased and surprised as people all over the United States. My goodness, is this what we’ve been doing? And look at the devastation that it caused. The devastation that we caused with Hiroshima was no more, no less than what had been going on all March, all spring. In March of that year when our fire bombers bombed Tokyo, they burned out 16 square miles in downtown Tokyo compared to 4 square miles at Hiroshima. So you can’t look at the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and say this is what the atom bomb meant. The atom bomb meant the end of the war that finally got their reluctant emperor Hiro Hito to go to his diehard militarists and tell them, look you have got to stop this war that you started. Japan can not survive. So that is what the Manhattan Project meant to me and to so many other people. And we were thrilled that what we did here at Y-12 brought that blessed peace to the world that we’d been praying and working so hard to do. So when I look at my bomb pin I think of the blessing it brought to the world that had been agonized for six long years by a war in which 54 million people were killed.
The legacy that came out of it has just been a tremendous blessing to the world at large. The application of nuclear medicine through radio isotopes made at ORNL, our brothers over at X10, and made right here in our beta 3 calutrons gave physicians tools that today are saving lives all over the world. Our enriched uranium is fueling nuclear power plants all over the world, improving the quality of life in countries that don’t have coal and oil and can’t afford them. So when you look at it that way, this is why I cherish that tiny little piece of silver. The other thing that it means to me that people need to understand and frequently they don’t know because there are some people that say, “Oh, I wish the country had never gotten into that. I wish we’d never developed an atomic bomb.” And the fact that you could release the power of the nucleus by splitting it with neutrons was known to everybody, including the Russians, Germans, French, and the British. None of those countries were able because of their resources and their close hand fighting of World War II, none of them were able to devote the resources, the priorities, the money, that the United States did. But every one of them wanted to do it, and since the war every one of them has done it, and it’s not because we did it and they stole our secrets. No, it’s because their scientists are brilliant just like ours are. Their scientists recognized the value of it, and they wanted their country to do it. If we hadn’t done it, the Russians still would have done it and under a dictator like Stalin there’s no question in my mind that they would have won the cold war and we’d be their—they wanted to covert us all to communism, and they could have done it. The thing that saved it is Y-12 and the rest of the nuclear weapons complex contributing to a national nuclear defense system that really kept them at bay and that’s a long answer to your question, but that’s what this little thing means to me.
A MIGHTY SYMBOL (RESTATED)
Well it’s a symbol that just carries a huge load of memories for me. The pins were given out by the war department a couple of months after the Japanese surrender. Secretary of war Patterson and General Groves came down to Oak Ridge and presented excellent awards flags, E award flags to all the contractors and the architect engineers and so on and announced that they were going to be giving pins and certificates to all of the workers on the project, and they came along a couple of months later. The little silver pins were given to people who had worked for the project at least a year and a half. They gave bronze pins to people that worked shortly. So all of us got them, there wasn’t any distinction made between who did what if you were employed, those were the ones who got the pins.
They mean to me though, a great deal more. I remember the day the bomb dropped, August the 6th, the Hiroshima bomb dropped. The way I found out about it, I was working in my lab in the front end of 9206 and all of a sudden I heard somebody running up and down the hall shouting uranium, uranium, uranium! This guy had found out that they dropped the bomb. His wife had called him from the town and told him over the radio, here’s the news, and he was freed from tuballoy, and he just couldn’t wait. It sounded so strange and of course it just horrified all the rest of us. That’s the way we found out about it, we were hard at work. But people often ask me, “How did Oak Ridger’s react?” And since most of the people here had no idea, including me, of exactly when it was going to happen or how big it was going to be, or what else was involved in it in Oak Ridge or in the rest of the country, we didn’t know if were the only people here in dogpatch or what. And so here all the news breaks in the papers that night and tells us what K-25 looked like and X-10 for the first time. So it was a huge surprise revelation to all of us. We were thrilled and delighted. Not by the death of 100,000 people at Hiroshima, no of course not, but in the middle of World War II we were used to horrible atrocities like that week after week after week for six long years. And in March, just a few months before Hiroshima our bombers had killed the same number of people in a fire bombing which is also perfectly horrible and the battle for Iwo Jima had cost lives of 160,000 Japanese troops. War is awful and you don’t look for the answers to the atom bomb by just looking at the ashes of a Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You have to look at the graves on Normandy and Anzio, the Patend death march and the killing of millions of Chinese by Japanese in Nan King. What we were thrilled about is that what we had done here had some part to play in getting their reluctant emperor, Hiro Hito to go to his diehard militarists and tell them you’ve got to stop this war that you’ve started. And so the blessed peace that we had prayed and worked so long and so hard for was finally a blessed reality, and that’s what my little silver pin means to me as far as the end of that war.
But then it carries another message and that is of the legacy of the project that came out of the application of our nuclear science. For instance Y-12’s calutrons were immediately put to work right after the war by researchers that wanted to produce stable isotopes that researchers could use to trace the uptake of fertilizer in plants. And as a result of it the agricultural productivity has just been made manifold times more productive, benefiting people all over the world. Radio isotopes have helped people diagnose and treat cancers, many other applications. Civilian nuclear power has benefited countries all over the world. It means that to me too.
And another aspect that I’m asked about that I find people don’t really appreciate the fact. I heard a fella stand up in a meeting one day where somebody had made a lecture on the Manhattan Project and he said, “You know I worked on the Manhattan Project, and I sometimes wonder if the country was right in even developing the atom bomb.” And nobody answered his question, but I got to thinking about it later and one thing is very clear to me and that is that other countries that now have the bomb didn’t develop them because we did and that they found out how to do it from stealing secrets from us. This whole concept of a release of nuclear energy by bombarding uranium with neutrons was discovered by German scientists in late 1938 and 1939 before World War II started. So it was no secret at all, physicists from Russia and France and Germany, Great Britain, United States all found out about it at the same time and dashed to their laboratories to repeat the experiments, see that could do that too, and they did it on this lab scale, and they started atomic bomb programs in Japan and in Russia and in Germany. But none of those programs went very far and the reason is that they didn’t have a leader like Roosevelt that as convinced that we ought to do it to make sure that we can control this development or at least have it before anybody else does. The other, Russia was so engaged in battling Germany who had attacked their homeland. Japan didn’t have the resources to put into this, and of course France was out of it. Great Britain went to work trying to do it, and their scientists came over here and we exchanged technology for awhile. But the fact of the matter is you see that after the war was over their scientists could go ahead with programs and they did, not in Japan, but they did in Russia and the Russian program was benefited by the fact that a British spy gave them the plans for our trinity device, but the head of the Robert Oppenheimer if you will, of Japan whose name was Kirtchitoff, the head of their head scientist, a brilliant guy. He already knew how to improve on the trinity device and Stalin’s man, Barea who was in charge of the KGB ordered Kirtchitoff not to improve on the trinity device. He didn’t want any excuse for not having a successful weapon task when it went off. So Kirtchitoff had to build that copy of the trinity device which they exploded in 1949. Kirtchitoff and his brilliant crew went right ahead, they developed a mini thermonuclear if you could call it that. It wasn’t a true thermonuclear, but it was a bomb that had many times more explosive power than Hiroshima. And he did that before the United States did. That program under Stalin would have exploded, would have been very successful, if consider what would happen if Stalin had that stockpile of weapons that he built without stealing our plans. They built a gas diffusion plant, later a centrifuge plant and so on and so on. They had a whole thermonuclear stockpile of missiles and so on. What if we had not gone ahead? What if we didn’t have Y-12? It would have been a different world, and it isn’t too dramatic I don’t think to say that we might have a hammer and sickle flying over Washington. The answer to the question is should we not have developed an atomic bomb, the answer is clearly no. The United States is saving the freedoms that have been fought for and died for, for our country and they’ve saved them, preserved them for future generations. We have peace through strength.
ABOUT JACK CASE
I left Y-12 from my Manhattan project days in 1949 and went over to K25, and it was 20 years before I got back to Y-12. When I came back in the 70s I was responsible for the research and development and technical divisions, all the laboratories, both at K25 and at Y-12. The union Carbide management had done the same thing with the technical organizations that they had done with engineering. They had engineering, George Rasney was responsible for engineering in both plants and it made very, very good sense because we could respond to the ebb and flow of production demands, program demands, moving people back and forth, and it was to the benefit of both organizations. But the reason I bring it up is that when I came over here in the 70s I was given an office in 9704-2, upstairs, right across the hall from Jack Case and it was a real honor, not just to have that new responsibilities but also to be in that position, and I had that nice office in the northwest corner upstairs. Jack was in the southeast corner, and he just, he made my job a whale of a lot easier, and as you can imagine if I needed to get into some problem that I had absolutely no idea where to go at Y-12, Jack would set me up. All it took was a phone call and I could get right in. Same thing with the laboratories. When I first went on trips to Los Alamos, Livermore, Jack took me along and introduced me to everybody so he and I always had a wonderful relationship. It was the peak pinnacle of his career, but he was just as easy to talk to as you are. He was, there was nothing stuffy or pretentious about Jack, and I think that’s one reason that you find that everybody has the highest regard and warmest feelings, not just high regard for his ability but beneath it all is sort of a warm feeling. He was a nice guy.
Jack was the longest tenured manager of Y-12, over 15 years. The closest one to him was Gordon Fee at nine years. But Jack had a long tenure at Y-12 as plant manager and was very successful, and no question in my mind but what a good part of his success was his universal appeal from the top brass all the way to the people who were doing the work on the machines because he was one of them. And Y-12’s challenge through the years has always been adapting to the cutting edge of machine tools, work, and we have always had all through our 50 year history, 60 year history we have always had the best machine tools and we’re always trying to push them to the absolute limit and this means the machinists down on the bottom that are doing the work, the guys that are really cutting the parts are continually faced with new machines, new challenges and Jack could make those transitions, make the challenges real to these people and the need for continually changing this and this and this, adapting to statisticians looking over your shoulder and so on, quality certification requirements because he was one of them.
A story that I really cherish is one that came from his very early days in Y-12, I think it was probably 1944 when he, not long after he came here as a machinist and reported for work and the shop foreman said, “Well your record looks like you claim that you have a lot of experience, first class machinist. Let’s see what you can do.” He said, “Here’s a tough, tough job.” He said, “Here’s some tungsten plates. Tungsten plates, and we want an ionic accelerating slip.” I’m sure he didn’t say ionic accelerating slip, but that’s what it was for the calutron. After you bombard the feed material and knock electrons off you’ve got ions, and you have to suck them out with the high voltage so that they go into the calutron and this tungsten would be a material that would hold up with the heat and the bombardment, but it had to have a thin slit in this plate and some of his shop foreman, some of his people had been working on these things. Tungsten is a beast of a material. It’s very brittle and it breaks very, very easily when you machine it and they’d been killing these parts and they had, he said, “Now I have a very limited supply of these tungsten part, and I’ve got to cut this slit in them.” Gave him the dimensions and so on. He said. “See what you can do, but please take it easy with them. Take your time, I know you haven’t done this before.
Some of our guys have been busting these right and left and we just don’t have very many left.”
And Jack said to him, “Yes, I’ll sure try to do that, first I have to make a phone call.” Shop foreman said, “A phone call?” “Yup, got to make a phone call.” So shop foreman gave Jack the traditional lecture on telephones. This was back in the war. There weren’t any telephones in the buildings except in the shop foreman’s office, one telephone. And people were not allowed to use them except for emergency phone calls, certainly not for personal use you know, and here’s this new employee saying he’s got to make a phone call. He figured it’s something urgent. He said, “Well go in my office and use that, but make it snappy.” So he went in and shut the door, glass windows. Shop foreman just forgot him except every once in a while he’d look over through the glass window and here’s jack still there and he’s sitting there writing stuff down and pounding it and shaking his head this way and that way, and he figures he’s really in trouble with his wife or something. Some school principal or doctor or something. Anyway, eventually Jack got done and went out to machine and the shop foreman forgot all about him. And the next day Jack comes into the foreman’s office and he hands him the five plates, each with a beautiful slit in it, the same five plates that the shop foreman had given him and they were perfect. And the shop foreman just was absolutely amazed. He said, “How in the world did you do that!” And he caught himself, he said, wait a minute, I don’t believe I want to know. He took the plates and he left him. What Jack had done was a great friend of everybody and he had called up somebody that he knew somewhere, somewhere in Knoxville that had worked with tungsten and found out how you do it, and the answer is that you don’t machine it at all, you heat the plate up until it’s real hot, you stamp the slot in it, and that’s a typical Jack Case story. When he needed some help he thought about who he could go to and he went to the right person, and the story is thanks to Bob Ellingson, Duke Ellingson who was one of Jack’s supervisors for years and held him in great regard, but he told me that story, and I think it’s quite nice, quite typical.
SAVING Y-12
Y-12’s first mission the one that general Groves gave them, Tennessee Eastman Corporation, was to furnish the highly enriched uranium for the first atomic bomb and Y-12 did it beautifully, very successfully, and their mission really was over at the end of the war. The questions, there were just dozens of questions about whether or not the calutrons were going to be able to do it. Were 1,152 enough?
Each one has to be operated separately and individually, tremendous labor intensive process, the chemistry involved not generally recognized. A huge amount, a huge fraction of the employment was involved in all this chemical recycling that had to be done. And because of the uncertainties in Y-12 Groves right from the beginning decided to put in a back up plant, K-25 which cost just as much, a little bit more than Y-12. Both of them half of a billion dollar plants, nearly 500 million dollars a piece and incredible war time success.
Well K25 instead of being a batch process is continuous. You just stick the stuff in at one end, and it wanders around and after a long, long, long time comes out highly enriched at the other end, but it doesn’t take anywhere near the people. Y-12 at its peak had 22,482 people in May of 1945. K25 half that many and produced the stuff at 10% or so of the cost of Y-12. So Y-12 started shutting down in the fall of ’45 and by the end of ’46 there were about 14,000 people here and on Christmas Eve notices went out to the rest of them, and there were only 2000 of us left in the end of January of ’46. So the question then, the picture then is that K-25 is doing Y-12’s job. By the middle of ’47, well by the end of ’46 after all the people were gone, Tennessee Eastman served notice to the Army that they’d like to be relieved. And that process took into the summer, and it was May that Tennessee Eastman left and Y-12’s 2000 people were taken over by Carbide and Carbon Chemicals who had been operating K-25. The question, what are we going to do?
A small group in beta 3 went to work trying to soup up the calutron so that they could beat K-25 and they tried hard, they made some tremendous improvements, but they were still a long way away.
Other people went to work doing other miscellaneous jobs for Warren or somebody else.
But the real question was does Y-12 have a future and that’s where this Jack Case story comes.
After Tennessee Eastman left in May and Carbide took over, Y-12’s population now is down to about 2000 people. We had 2000 people wondering what we were going to do in the next year. At the same time now out at Los Alamos they were having; the AEC Washington was having some problems with the Los Alamos management because they were very anxious to have Los Alamos produce some other copies of little boy, other copies of fat man. The Los Alamos physicists, the key brains out there that were doing the creative work researching, they wanted very much to continue to explore this nuclear science and to do studies in applying this nuclear science, the physics, write papers, do cross section studies, make new isotopes, evaluate their properties, and so on and so on. They wanted to do research, and the idea of just cranking out Chinese copies of little boy that they already knew how to do did not appeal at all to the top physicist, science structure the pure physicists that were out there. They didn’t have a lot of room to expand production facilities, put up production plants. The kind of people that do that kind of work and the machinists that they had to have and so on, Los Alamos does not really geographically or topographically makes the structure, not just you know. Walter J. Williams, Jack told me, was a guy that used to be in Oak Ridge but had gone to headquarters to work with the AEC. Walter Williams said, “Look we’re having a terrible time out at Los Alamos getting everybody into the act.” Some people out there are willing to do it, there were some SED people that had made the bomb parts, actually the hands on work, and they were happy to do it. But Walter Williams said, “Look we’ve got a huge facility there at Bear Creek Valley in Y-12. They’ve got these fantastic machine shops that supported the calutron operations. They know how to do machining. They’ve got these buildings that we can covert. Why don’t we ask Y-12? Why don’t we put our production mission at Y-12?”
So that idea sparked a visit and Y-12 got told to send a team to Los Alamos to look at how you make bombs, how you make bomb parts and safety precautions you have to use and criticality. Learn how to do that and think about setting it up at Y-12. And it turns out that that team was Jack Case. Representing the machining part of the business, Whimpy Hilton from Tool Design and Doctor John Strohecker from Engineering. A great team, but isn’t it interesting that Jack was right there at that time in July, and John Strohecker told me the story just in 1997 when I was trying to get my little chronology together. John Strohecker said, “Yeah well that was an interesting trip. Jack and Whimpy and I went out there, and we had the name of somebody that had set up the clearances, and we got out there the first day and they took us through their top secret shops. We saw all the parts, we saw how they put them together, and we just, in that general orientation that morning we just figured, boy, hey, that’s something good for Y-12.” About noon somebody blew the whistle on them up the line, jerked their clearances and kicked them out of the plant, all three of them. Hauled them out and set them down outside. You ca go get rooms in Santa Fe or something, and we’ll try to get this straightened out, except they didn’t want to straighten it out, they wanted them out. Well it’s from the group of people that Jack said that, John Strohecker said he and Jack and Whimpy spent three to four weeks out there. I said, “What were you doing?” He said, “Well we were phoning Oak Ridge trying to tell them to get somebody to work to get to Washington to call down here and straighten this mess out.” They were also on the phones talking to their spouses back here and they did a lot of hiking. They went to Bandolier and they went up to the Caldera and they just went all over the area soaking up the thing, they spent time in Santa Fe, they hiked and they sightseed for three or four weeks, and finally somebody made all the connections from headquarters and so on and so on and they got back in, and they came back to Oak Ridge and had with them then the understanding of the processes.
Strohecker was a brilliant chemical engineer and did a lot of the design work, for example in 9207, did all the design work for that hafnium zirconium separation process, very good man. So Jack and John Whimpy came back to Oak Ridge with the information, and taught us how to do tow things we didn’t know how to do before, and one was the reduction of the uranium green salt which we knew how to make and which was our product all through the war, but reduce that to metal, uranium metal, into a button and then something you could melt, cast, roll, form and then machine. And Jack is the one that brought back the machining information. Jack Case is the one that brought back the information of how you could put hoods around machines so that you could safely machine uranium and then suck the air out so that you didn’t have any dust which might catch fire or so that you didn’t have any dust that you had to worry about breathing and the proper kinds of lubricants that you can use for your tools. So Jack brought back that information, helped build a new machine shop so that we could machine uranium, and John Strohecker brought back the information about the chemistry so that we could start producing uranium metal and then machine it. It was actually the fall of ’47 we actually started doing some machine parts, and we started then taking the product K-25 U06 and actually processing it. And that started Y-12 off on its second era, what I call its second era, it’s second mission, and it got us into the real heart of the nuclear fuel cycle. It took us a few years to work into that. The stamp that pulled us in as an integral part of the nuclear weapons complex happened in 1950 when we got the assignment to separate the lithium 6 from the lithium 7 isotopes needed for the thermonuclear weapon. Then we did that, did a marvelous job with that in the mid 1950s to mid 60s, and that was a tremendous success. I call that our second Manhattan project because we just dropped everything to get that done in alpha 4, alpha 5 and many other buildings and Y-12, but that got us into the being considered as really an integral part. They couldn’t get along without us, and we had really an integrated system here from the standpoint of building components for the nuclear weapons system and also having the capability of being able to design, come up with device parts for testing, nuclear testing that the labs were doing. So we were always working with brand new parts.